


A Handful of Dust

by fluorescentgrey



Series: In the Garden [1]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Depression, Drug Abuse, Drug Addiction, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Muggle-born Culture, Post-First War with Voldemort, Punk, Recreational Drug Use, Wizard Rock, Wizarding Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-12
Updated: 2016-12-03
Packaged: 2018-08-30 15:14:07
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 8
Words: 61,820
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8537956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fluorescentgrey/pseuds/fluorescentgrey
Summary: Or: the Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins, 1983-1991. "Nothing good ever happens in a Knockturn Alley dive bar after midnight..."





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> NB: please be warned that i am serious when i use the "drug addiction" and "drug abuse" tags, though these will come into play a little later in the story. i am also serious about the "depression" and "mental health issues" tags. both of these elements will play major thematic parts at various moments in this story.  
> i'm also aware that i've posted this at a challenging political and historical moment. to some extent that is why i wrote this story. there are some major elements of this story regarding discrimination, bigotry, hate, racism, sexism, etc., in the wizarding world / the world of canon. so if you're looking for an escape from the real world, be warned that this fic might not be the fic for you right now.  
> please let me know if i should tag or warn for anything else that i've left out.  
> all the music in the first two chapters is linked [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/153095254560/i-posted-chapters-1-and-2-of-a-new-fic-called-a).

_Datta_ : what have we given?  
My friend, blood shaking my heart  
The awful daring of a moment’s surrender  
Which an age of prudence can never retract  
By this, and this only, we have existed  
Which is not to be found in our obituaries  
Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider  
Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor  
In our empty rooms

— T.S. Eliot, _The Waste Land_

_\--_

“I love you… I love you whether you like it or not.” 

— Peter Doherty to Carl Barat in the NME, 2004

\-- -- -- -- 

Everyone knows nothing good ever happens in a Knockturn Alley dive bar after midnight. But last Saturday morning around three AM in the basement of Dyatlov & Roswell (beside the rattling crates of contraband) this writer discovered why Wizarding London's most buzzed about new band is the Hobgoblins. Drenched in sweat, clad in thrift store garb (less _trendy vintage_ than _actually full of holes, and are those bloodstains_?), sharing a microphone and a fifth of firewhiskey, co-frontmen (and flatmates) Stubby and Jack started off their hour-long set with striking Lennon/McCartney harmonies and ended it with raucous punk cuts that shook the floor — then a fistfight. I talked to them afterward as Stubby tried to help Jack staunch his bloody nose. 

WRW: Can't you just use Episky? 

JACK: He's shit at healing spells. He went to posh boarding school and instead of all that they learned necromancy. 

STUBBY: Anyway I failed that course too. 

WRW: I didn't hear what you said before Jack punched you, Stubby. 

JACK: Nor did I really. I think he said I ought to get out of his face. 

STUBBY: That's not what I said. Jack has a persecution complex. He thinks I want to be the frontman. But I don't. Hobgoblins is the two of us. 

JACK: It couldn't come from anyone else. It's this thing strung up between us like a chain. 

STUBBY: You make it sound like — like a kind of torture, love. 

JACK: Well it is sometimes innit?

— first Hobgoblins feature in _Wizarding Rock Weekly_ , October 1985

—

** February 1991 **

The sky was a big spreading hollow dawn-grey which had ripped through the roof of the van. A jagged and bloody ichorous wound and beyond it the pale green heath which was vacant of any feature. The acrid curdling smoke had woken him because bright blue-yellow flames had begun to lick at the engine in its box beyond the shattered windshield. He understood he was going to have to get out of the van if he wanted to live but he was increasingly uncertain of this prospect. His ears were ringing and there was some large opaque cloud of something in his eye he later realized was blood. He leant down and groped for his bag under his seat; the vials had shattered and it was wet. He tucked it inside his coat. Then he tried his door, but it wouldn’t budge, so he climbed through the windshield — something was wrong with his knee, and with his shoulder — into the black baptismal reality of smoke, the flame, the eerie burbling of the melted radio and the wind. When he had gotten away from it enough he knelt at the side of the road. For a while he couldn’t see, because of the blood in his eye and the smoke, but when he could he saw the rest of them were scattered across the field. Ras was looking up at him with a dazed relief. He had saved their spare guitars from the back of the van. But then his face changed and he looked away again. 

After a while he stood up and took out his cigarettes and lit one. His hands were shaking with a kind of withdrawal-ish violence and at first the flame he could usually get wandlessly into his fingers wouldn’t come. Across the road and left and right the heath spread out without terminus and for a while he entertained perhaps they had all died and this was at the very least purgatory, though it was probably hell. He did not dare look at the bag inside his coat to figure out what had broken. Perhaps he ought to bury it. Perhaps he ought to bury everything. Perhaps he ought to crawl into the bog and bury himself to be uncovered in millennia as evidence of some or another conjecture. 

Instead he sat down again, because he was dizzy. After not so very long he heard the atonal orchestral wailing like a kind of demon lullaby of sirens from the southeast coming up the road.

\--

I. 

Jack moved to North London not two weeks after his miraculous Hogwarts graduation in the summer of 1983. He could not stomach the thought of spending another summer with his parents in their tiny Brixton flat and as such he had registered for summer classes at the Magical Graduate College of London, where he would begin in the autumn a two-year graduate course in Wizarding Art History. Though he was particularly interested in neither of the classes ( _Legendary Wizarding History of Britain_ ; _Intro to Complex Arithmancy_ ) he thought perhaps he would change his enrollment to an audit and find a job. This was eventually secured for him by his flatmate, Lupin, who had graduated from Hogwarts five years before Jack had and had made it out rather poorly from the war. He was also a werewolf, which meant he let the spare room in the flat very cheaply. Dumbledore had secured Lupin a job in the library which he performed rather halfassedly as he was, it seemed, almost perpetually stoned. 

Jack was charged with shelf reading and was paid under the table seven sickles an hour, which technically was below minimum wage. If he worked fifty hours in a month he had enough for his rent. He went to the library then went to class and then he went back to the flat and got stoned with Lupin and they listened to records. They didn’t talk about Hogwarts which was just as well because Jack had had a terrible time of it especially in the last year, and he recalled sometimes Lupin and his friends, who had been seventh years when Jack was only twelve: two of whom were dead, one of whom had strung the ropes up for them, sitting by the lake smoking cigarettes and listening to Led Zeppelin IV looking dangerous and unapproachable. 

Lupin had a guitar he said was his father’s and Jack checked a lesson book out from the library and began to try and play it. He taught himself three chords, then he taught himself how to play “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” He tried to sing; his voice wasn’t very good, but he didn’t think it mattered. He went out at night and stole plywood from construction sites and built in the corner of his room a tiny crawlspace darkroom, and he went out to shows and developed the photographs at home and hung them to dry in wet ribbons like prayer flags around the flat. He and Lupin went out on the tube to see the Stone Roses and the Smiths and New Order and Magazine. When he was feeling magnanimous about it Lupin would let Jack have one or two of the heavy-duty werewolf sedatives they gave out in orange pill bottles at the supervised transformation cells on the Isle of Dogs. If you took half of one and laid in the warm bath it felt like being just born. He tried to write a song about it but his hands felt not really attached. He brought the tape player in the bathroom and listened to Butthole Surfers and Husker Du and R.E.M. and chain-smoked until the room seemed blurred in a pale fog. 

In September when class started he collaged his photographs into zines and copied them in a nearby Muggle shop, because he was trying to raise enough money to buy a slide projector and do a Nan Goldin sort of thing, and because his Art History textbooks were dearly expensive. He had liked the _Legendary Wizarding History of Britain_ class so he enrolled in another with the same professor and most of the same students called _Symbols of Arcadia_. His first (and in the end the only) paper he wrote for the class was titled _Futhark Staves and Wizarding Communitymaking, AD 300-700_. Not long thereafter Lupin came back to the flat when he was playing guitar and said, “Are you up to anything?” 

“Not really.” 

“Want to come out?” 

He was already putting his boots on but he said, “What for?” 

They walked across the quad. The moon was waxing and as such Lupin looked rather strained. He was only twenty-three but sometimes he looked a thousand years old. There was a nicotine stain between his fingers and he patched the elbows on all his clothes several times. Jack sometimes suspected he stole things from laundromats and had often wondered if behind closed doors in the flat he was shooting heroin. 

“You know you put that stack of your zines in the great room in the library,” Lupin said. 

“Sure.” 

“This kid started asking me about it. He wants to meet you.” 

In later years he remembered his certainty this would be bad, which seemed prescient. The man himself was waiting on the steps of the Anthropology building. Jack had seen Rastaban Q. Boardman IV before, because he had also taken _Legendary Wizarding History of Britain_ and sat in the back corner in _Symbols of Arcadia_. He was nineteen and a second year in Magical Law at the MGC. The Boardman dynasty had maintained at least two seats on the Wizengamot since 1266 and upon his graduation Rastaban was wholeheartedly expected to take one (in the end that would wind up the responsibility of his younger sister Whyland X. Boardman, who was assassinated in 1994 by Death Eater sympathizers). As such he had been sent to an exclusive private wizarding boarding school in Massachusetts, which was attended mostly by the children of literal kings. His was the purest of pure blood but as such he had a little inbred madness to him and a lazy eye. At the time when he and Jack met he seemed fairly convinced he was the second coming of Morrissey at the very least but probably also Jesus. He looked like a character in a novel by E.M. Forster or Evelyn Waugh, rakish and disarming, drunk, in rumpled robes, like he had picked them up presently off someone’s floor, in his eyes a kind of knife edge of a death wish, and he was holding a cigarette very elegantly. He was altogether like a very good painting or a car wreck. In fact he was both; he was a very good painting of a car wreck. 

“Boardman,” said Lupin, “this is Jack Childermass.” 

They shook hands. “Lupin says you play guitar,” said Boardman. 

\--

Ras lived at the time in Fortis Green in a rowhouse which had been in his family since the late nineteenth century. The Boardmans at this juncture were “cash poor” and much of Ras’s money was tied up in his trust, but for a monthly stipend officiated by his family’s lawyers which just barely covered his textbooks and cocaine habit. He was known to host infamous parties on all three floors of the house with music and dance and performance art and works of guerrilla theater and blacklights and hallucinogenic drugs, and, purportedly, orgies in the attic. One of which had happened three days before Jack went over for the first time, and Ras had not yet cleaned up. 

Lupin hadn’t had a case for his father’s guitar so Jack was obliged to magic together something for it out of some old dress robes and cradle it in his arms on the tube. On the way to Fortis Green he listened to a Philip Glass cassette. He was still thinking something about this would end badly but couldn’t put his finger on what exactly that meant. Something was twisting in his stomach as though he were hungover or starving but he had stopped on the way and bought a sandwich. He was thinking but pretending he wasn’t thinking about Ras’s face on the steps of the Anthropology building, and his lazy eye, which was a pale vivid fairy ring of green drifting as if magnetized toward the center. 

At the house when Ras answered the door the twisting thing in Jack’s belly unspooled. There was unfamiliar music coming from inside and the house was dark. Ras was wearing jeans and a white tank that looked slept-in and a patterned silk smoking jacket and no shoes or socks. There was a tattoo on his foot he’d done himself with a needle and pen ink which Jack couldn’t make out. They shook hands again and Ras ushered him inside. 

“Lupin said you’ve been playing guitar all of three months but you’re really good,” Ras said. Somewhere there was a teakettle boiling. The house was cavernous and echoed and there were dust bunnies in the corners, and abandoned lipstick-printed glassware. In the living room the record on the stereo was Bowie’s _Station to Station_. A mirror had been taken down from the wall, leaving a dark print against the floral wallpaper, and set atop an ottoman in the center of the room. There were still dregs of coke on it like a smattering of pale dust. “Want a cigarette?” said Ras from the doorway. “Or tea?” 

“Cup of tea would be nice.” 

“With — ”

“Cream. No sugar. Thank you.” 

He sat in one of the chairs by the mirror and unwrapped the guitar from his old dress robes and tried to play along with Bowie. The record had come around to “Golden Years.” By the time Ras came back with two teacups Jack thought he had half of it. The teacups were blue willow that looked expensive but Ras put them directly down on the mirror. He had kept for himself the one that was chipped and given Jack the more pristine. “What kinds of bands do you like?” he asked. 

“Muggle music mostly.” 

“Like what?” 

“Um, John Cale. Obviously I like Bowie. And the Stooges and Television and Gang of Four. Actually I’ve been listening to this band from America called Wipers — ” 

Ras started singing “Can This Be.” “Who’s making such a deal that’s not the way it feels…” 

“And Butthole Surfers,” Jack went on, “and Husker Du, and X, and Pylon and This Heat. What about you.” 

“All that stuff. Also Adam Ant and the Clean and Nick Cave. Squeeze, you know, Swell Maps… d’you know the Birthday Party?” 

Jack didn’t, so Ras got up and put on _Prayers on Fire_. “I’m trying to start a band,” said Ras, as though for the whole time this hadn’t been glaringly obvious. “I’ve been playing guitar for a little while but I’m not that good.” 

“Your singing’s alright.” It was better, in fact, than alright. 

“Thank you. I’ve talked to a few other people. But they all want to sound like the Smiths.” Jack bit his tongue on the fact that it seemed very clear to him Ras was trying to dress and carry himself like Morrissey. “I want to try something different. Everybody at our college even the creative folks have the same sort of — well I guess, even if they’re doing good work they want to contribute to the canon. I say fuck the canon.” 

Jack laughed and took a sip of tea. He wasn’t sure he meant it but he echoed Ras: “Fuck the canon.” 

“Can you sing?” 

“Badly.” 

Ras got up again and turned off _Prayers on Fire_. “Want to sing something?” 

He royally did not want to but he did because Ras was watching him. He played and sang John Cale’s “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend.” Most of the song was piano and keyboards but he had taught himself to play it on guitar. He had done a lot of listening to the song around the time he had been briefly expelled from Hogwarts before the appeal and the whole drama of it, and he lay in his bed in the room he was renting in Hogsmeade with the fear, and the fear looked at him with very loving eyes and stroked his hair. By the second chorus Ras had figured it out and sang it with him. 

“Your singing is good,” said Ras, when he had finished. The truth was it sounded good when they sang together.

“Go get your guitar,” said Jack, he was a little breathless, not from singing. He kept chewing his lips into his mouth to keep from beaming. “I can teach it to you and we can play it again together.” 

Ras did. He thundered on the stairs. 

\--

He taught Ras “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend” and Ras taught him “Tally Ho” by the Clean. They played “Can This Be” and “Sex Bomb” by Flipper and “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and half of Black Flag’s _Damaged_. When Jack next looked out the window it was very dark. 

Neither of them had class till ten the next day. They walked down to the shop on the corner and got madras curry and pakoras and went back and ate at the polished mahogany dining table. Evidence of the party was everywhere Jack looked but Ras didn’t speak much about it. There were several used condoms in the bathroom trash can. But there were also beers in the fridge, of which they had several, and then Ras rolled a joint. They got very stoned and tried to figure out the entire Velvet Underground & Nico LP, then it was midnight so they were obliged to snort a bunch of coke in order to stay awake and play through _Lust for Life_. 

In the morning he woke up in the armchair when Ras shook his shoulder and pressed into his open hand a hangover potion in a fluorescent purple bottle. When Jack sat up two empty beer bottles at his feet clattered against each other and fell. “It’s nine thirty,” Ras said, very softly, indicating his own headache. “I have a Portkey coming for us. Do you want to borrow some clothes?” 

He went to class, in the end, ten minutes late, with Lupin’s guitar, in one of Ras’s oversized patterned silken shirts and a brown knit cardigan patched at the elbows, hair a mess, unshowered, looking like bargain bin Johnny Marr. There was no time to go back to the flat and get his notebook or textbook so he looked on with his neighbor and made notes in the pocket notebook where he usually wrote lyrics, but his attention kept drifting away from him on whatever tidal current, back to the record player and the living room singing Iggy Pop, “I must be hungry — cause I go crazy over your leather boots…” 

\--

For the next few days he noodled around a bit on guitar sharpening a song he had started writing. He went through his notebook of lyrics and lost track of time and missed classes and after a little while he thought he had three different ideas that might go together. It sounded like John Cale’s “Gun,” but not too much. So on Wednesday night he stuck his head in the Floo and summoned Ras, who was in the front room at the house in Fortis Green smoking a joint reading one of his Arthurian books and listening to the Raincoats. His face lit up when he saw Jack in the fireplace. 

“Hate to barge in on you.” 

“It’s — actually I was just going to Floo you.” He laughed. “Have you heard James Chance and the Contortions?” 

“Yeah, of course.” 

“Well they had a bootleg live tape over at Bad Magic Records.” 

He referred to a wizarding music shop near Regent’s Park all the MGC students frequented. The shop was owned by a creep with a John Waters mustache who specialized in Muggle punk tapes and antique wizarding music, which was largely terrible but experiencing a recent and mostly ironic resurgence. The owner also hosted in-store performances by wizarding rock bands in the shop’s back room; as such, this was where Ras and Jack would play their first show as the Hobgoblins outside of the Fortis Green rowhouse in the early autumn of 1984. 

“I wrote a song,” said Jack. “Well, almost, and I wondered — ”

Ras sat up a little straighter in the armchair. “Come over and play it for me. We can work on it.” 

He was nervous to bring Lupin’s dad’s guitar through the fire so he backed out of it and Apparated directly into Ras’s living room. In the interim Ras had gone upstairs and got his own guitar and a Muggle drum machine he’d shown Jack last time. 

“I futzed it with magic,” he explained. “I think now it’ll — well, we’ll have to see. You should play the song first.” 

Jack did. There were three sections — a verse, bridge, and chorus — but he had no idea how to bring them together. And the lyrics of the chorus weren’t very good; all he had was the sort of refrain, which was, “in the garden…” He played it twice through and on the third go Ras played it with him. When Jack stopped after the verse Ras kept going and brought it into the bridge with a clever (if Smiths-y) line. They built on this together to bring the bridge into the chorus then out again into the second verse. 

“What if you sing, in the garden, and I sing — something else around it,” Ras said. 

“Like what?” 

“Well, what does the garden mean to you.”

Jack hesitated. This required opening a door he had heretofore kept locked sometimes even to himself. “Well it was — first it was being in love you know and it was like springtime, and then everything started to die, so the song is like, I walked into it, you know, where it was inside my mind, and it was all black and blighted and rotting.” 

“Like an oil spill, right,” said Ras, “and very quiet.” 

“Except crows screaming. Carrion birds.” 

“When we record it we can do the effect with magic.” He fiddled with the tuning on his guitar. “Let’s play it again through the chorus and I’ll see.” 

_In the garden — I was caught in my head  
_ _In the garden — everything’s gone black and dead  
_ _In the garden — I remember everything you said  
_ _In the garden — but you made your bed_

They played it through twice and then a third time with the drum machine and they stretched the last chorus out, singing around each other in a sort of twisted fugue, “you made your bed, you made your bed…” Then Ras went upstairs and got his tape player and they recorded it four times over until they did a take with only two or three mistakes. 

“That can be the first single,” Ras said. “Now we have to write a b-side.” 

“We should do b-sides like the Beatles where they’re just as good.” 

Ras laughed. “We’ve written one song and you’re comparing us to the Beatles.” 

They laughed about it but they knew the song was good. They would write perhaps one hundred songs together over the course of the band’s career, many of which were quite good, but this felt like — almost some approximation of the moment when you travelled by Floo and there was a split second where you felt like you might catch on fire. It felt like this perhaps ten or fifteen times more, and in the last two songs they wrote together, and in the long dark days when he saw Ras very rarely, when he would show up at the door with coffee for them both and cigarettes. 

\--

Many years later in Byberry Prison Ras brought him a guitar that he had magically shrunk down to the size of a coin so as to get it past the jailers in his jacket pocket. When Jack saw what it was he wept and couldn’t stop weeping through their entire conversation. It had been about four months and this was the first Ras had come. He looked thin, but he said he had been writing songs. Jack would later find out he had recently checked himself out of St. Kelly’s, a “residential mental illness treatment center” for witches and wizards in Northumberland. He kissed Jack’s cheek and the palm of his hand and then he held Jack’s wrist with the thumb pressed up against the pulse. 

“How are you,” he said, “how do you feel, how are you doing?” 

In Byberry Prison one could get one’s hands on pretty much any Class A Muggle drug one desired, but there was absolutely positively nobody foolhardy enough to attempt a trade in unicorn blood. The withdrawal had lasted a month or so. Still he sometimes had a hard time eating, not that he wasn’t hungry. The inside of his body froze up. He had to remind himself to breathe. His mind would go completely blank like a chalkboard. Otherwise it was like an expanding eternity of screaming. Worst of all sometimes in his periphery he thought he could still glimpse the swarming manifestation of darkness like a cloud of gnats. 

“Fine,” Jack said, “I’m fine.” 

He went back to the cell, and it took him a couple days softly speaking the spell without a wand to enlarge the guitar enough to play. When he could he played “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend,” then he played “In the Garden.” In the tiny room his voice echoed and he closed his eyes. Ras was with him in the candlelit darkness inside his mind and they leaned in together. 

_I’ve tried to put it past me but there’s something in the way  
_ _I’ve driven out to Milton Keynes just the other day  
_ _I wish you would’ve told me what you wanted from the start of it  
_ _It’s been years and I’m still sitting here rereading every part of it  
_ _In the garden…_

It was altogether so very prescient. Even in the very earliest of the days they had tapped the vein of it. He couldn’t go on. His hands felt numb. The old gold thing in all his soul was burning but the room was very cold. 

\--

“What’s that song about,” Ras asked. They had done some finishing to the song with magic and Jack had gone down the street to fetch a curry whilst Ras went to the liquor store, and they were sitting on the floor in the drawing room listening to Echo and the Bunnymen sharing a fifth of very cheap whiskey.

“It’s about how I was expelled from Hogwarts.” 

“Well why were you expelled from Hogwarts?” 

There was no point in lying about it now that the song was about it and it stretched out like an odalisque between them this thing they had created together out of the big black spot. “I was sleeping with a professor.” 

Ras’s eyebrow cocked halfway up his forehead such that it disappeared into his fringe. 

“It was — uncovered. And so I was accused of, um, of cheating and plagiarism and all the like. It was altogether very fucking stupid. It was — I was seventeen you know and fancied I was in love or whatnot.” 

“How old was the — ” 

That was not the question he was asking and they both knew it. 

“He was like forty-five. Married with two kids. Taught astronomy. At which of course I was no good.” 

“What is — but you graduated.” 

“I appealed it, you know, I took it to Dumbledore. I was — I figured it would be stupid if I ruined my life at seventeen because of — love, I guess.” 

Ras was quiet for a second. Then he said, “I don’t think it’s stupid to ruin your life because of love.” 

“You’ll think that until you do it. Or you almost do it. Then it’s like — there’s a big black void stretching out in front of you. And either you step into it… and you don’t know if your broomstick flies. Or you have to let it go. So I did — and he was sacked from Hogwarts. But Dumbledore got him a research grant studying Manx astrology.” 

Ras passed the fifth of whiskey back into Jack’s hand. “Never took you for the homewrecking type,” he said. 

Something almost quite rage (old and familiar jilted rage) coursed through him — a coldness that seemed to burn. “I wouldn’t’ve done shit if he hadn’t slandered me to the fucking school board of directors. I never cheated on a thing in my life. I never even copied homework off someone else. That he supposed there would be no consequences for sleeping with his bloody sixteen year old student is honestly laughable.” 

He realized too late that Ras had not yet seen him get angry. But he couldn’t stop. 

“The worst thing is, it seems he thought I would just take the dive because I was smitten or whatnot. Which honestly tells me mostly he did not really know me at all. Though he claimed to.” 

“Write another song about it,” said Ras. 

“God knows I am damn well trying.” 

“Write something angry about it. Like that was a sad song, that was a Young Marble Giants song. Or more like it was a Joy Division-y song.”

“Oh, bloody hell.” 

“No, you know I mean that in a nice way. But it was. You ought to write a song like ‘What Difference Does It Make.’” 

“Dear lord, Ras, I thought you said, fuck the canon.” 

“You have to beg borrow and steal from the canon to fuck the canon. Wasn’t that Picasso, good artists borrow…” His smile was big and bright and increasingly it twisted a little to the left the way Jack would later notice it did when he was Onto Something, when he had the bones of a story and was running with it regardless of whether or not the story was true. “You ought to write like a good and scary punk song and then we can put it on the b-side. You can scream on it like Crass or something.” 

“In the Garden backed with Debauched Schoolboy Blues.” 

Ras cackled. “You can’t call it that. You have to leave some room for speculation.” 

“We need to think of a name for the band before we think of a name for a song that doesn’t yet exist.” 

That night they did a bunch of coke and made a list of concepts they thought should inform the band. Central among them was the fact that they had been enrolled together in courses about legendary wizarding history of Britain. Playing off this seemed like another gleeful way to fuck the canon. Ras put forth a whole bunch of Arthurian concepts and for about an hour insisted they should name the band Corbenic. “It sounds like an American health tonic from the ‘50s,” Jack said. “Nobody’s going to get the bloody reference. And if they do then we’re putting ourselves forth to them as a bunch of impotent Fisher Kings.” 

“You come up with something better and I’ll give it to you.” 

Probably because he was high he was picturing the two of them as the witches in Macbeth. Magic as popularly understood in Muggle and even in old wizarding mythology. The realm of dark and secret beasts with a quiet chain-link bond. In the end of the day, he thought, magic was about monsters. “Goblins,” he said. “The Goblins.” 

Ras looked at him in the darkness which his liquid eyes tore open. The light from the street was blue in the whites of them. The record on the turntable had come to the end of the side. Jack found he didn’t even remember what had been playing, because it didn’t matter; there were a thousand songs in his head. 

“Hobgoblins,” said Ras. With a delicate weight — like he said a spell. 

\--

In a month’s time Jack filed the paperwork necessary to drop out of Magical Graduate College of London. Ras had as good as dropped out but didn’t see a need to make it official. Owls came daily from assorted Boardmans which Ras ignored. Jack moved out of Lupin’s flat on a Tuesday evening, dismantled the darkroom he’d built, and showed the empty room to ex-classmates until a girl called El from his old Arithmancy class, who Jack had suspected might also be a werewolf, said she’d take it. 

There was a spare bedroom upstairs in the Fortis Green rowhouse which became nominally Jack’s but he rarely slept in it. Most of the time he spent with Ras in the drawing room playing songs or listening to records. Jack went out and made more copies of the zine and peddled them in all the magical bookstores and record shops in North London and after a few weeks he had enough money to buy an electric guitar and an amplifier. He had no need of effects or tuning pedals, because there were spells for all that he learned from a book he shoplifted. He listened to Minor Threat and Descendents and wrote a very punk b-side for “In the Garden” called “Lies and Slander.” Ras had two songs they finished together and recorded with drum machine, then they copied cassettes with magic for a whole day. Jack made album art with a photograph of the two of them having tea in the drawing room armchairs and script text that changed color: _In the Garden with the Hobgoblins_. On the back: 

_A1. In the Garden  
_ _A2. Felix Felicis  
_ _B1. Assisted Suicide 3  
_ _B2. Lies and Slander_

_All songs written by Boardman/Childermass, Fortis Green, London, October 1983_

Very quickly — so quickly it felt as though it had been always — the only time they would be apart was when one of them went out to the grocery store and the other to the liquor store. Or when they were asleep and even then he found Ras was in all of his dreams. He learned what kind of cigarettes Ras liked and got to be personally acquainted with his coke dealer and his family’s lawyers, who came to the door to deliver checks monthly even despite the growing frequency of desperate owls from every Boardman who was at all invested in Ras’s receiving a degree in magical law. Jack realized he greatly enjoyed answering the door for the lawyers clad in one of Ras’s overlarge smoking jackets and little else, smoking a joint, hungover, rumpled; it gave him a secret guilty thrill to think about what the lawyers might tell Ras’s parents, or that Ras might be cut off from his inheritance, which seemed like it could level whatever playing field between them had not yet been leveled. And the guiltiest thrill of all which was that whenever he would do this Ras would be in the sitting room with a cup of tea listening to Dead Can Dance and laughing hysterically. “Fix your hair,” he whispered one morning when the lawyers knocked. “Fucked-looking-er hair.” Jack attempted as such in the mirror propped on the ottoman but eventually was obliged to crouch down beside Ras so he could do it himself with the focus of a mad artist.

They did not talk about their families. Jack had not heard from his own since he had come to MGC for summer courses. After the circumstances of his expulsion they had talked to him little despite his reenrollment. They were Muggles and largely mystified about the complete affair. He could not remember if they had even seen him do magic since Christmas break of first year. For a while they had held out hope he would end up in some Muggle college studying Economics or, better yet, Theology. Both paths sufficiently foregone, they appeared to have given up. He could not quite say he blamed them. 

They threw one of Ras’s infamous parties and sold the tapes. At first they had planned to perform live at some point in the night but it became immediately clear half the crowd was on ecstasy and all they wanted to do was dance. Ras DJ’d the best/worst of Muggle pop radio until he wandered away “for beers” and disappeared. Jack had invited Lupin who showed up after midnight looking stoned at which point Jack was thoroughly ripped (having not turned down any drugs he had been offered since around 9pm) and put on Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” 

“Ha bloody ha,” said Lupin. He smelled like snow. “When are you guys going to play.” 

“Not going to happen tonight unfortunately as we’d clear the room and kill the vibe I’m afraid.” 

Lupin furrowed his brow a bit and drew a neatly rolled joint from the pocket of his coat. “El’s got a show on MGC college radio. I’m sure you guys could play it. She likes to have live bands on but you know all the students’ bands at MGC are deeply awful.” 

He wondered if Lupin and El were sleeping together and felt a bit put out over it for some reason not immediately discernible. “Well, right now we just play with a drum machine. We need like, real musicians.” 

“I bet if you went on the radio you could find some. El has a good time slot — Tuesday nights at 8pm. Half the campus will be listening.” 

“Can’t you play — you could play bass.” 

“I can’t.” 

“But — ”

“You don’t want me in your band.” 

He had a cold shadow on his face. Jack left it. 

“I’m old and pathetic,” Lupin said. He smiled, and so did Jack, though this wasn’t the real reason, and they both understood it. “Let me buy a tape from you, though. And I’d love it if you would DJ ‘Thorn of Crowns.’” 

He in fact didn’t want to DJ anything at all and wanted to go looking for Ras. Something had started stirring up kind of sick in his stomach like an anticipation that was mostly fear. He remembered he had once been bemused by the orgy rumors. “You could play records for a while if you wanted.” 

“Oh, well — ”

“I trust you with our collection.” 

He looked at Lupin and Lupin looked at him. The thing shifting far back in Lupin’s eyes either a stoned thing or a beast thing or just a Lupin thing. Behind his own he knew was something similar. 

“Alright,” said Lupin finally. 

“And give us a hit, why don’t you. And you can take a tape for free and another for El.” 

His heart was slamming against the cage of his ribs. It’s the coke, he told himself. But then the tiny David Bowie who lived in his brain started singing, “it’s not the side effects of the cocaine…” 

He left Lupin with “Thorn of Crowns.” There were people kissing on the stairs or snorting coke or smoking cigarettes or pipes of assorted persuasion and people dropping acid and people holding each others’ faces and staring pointedly into each others’ eyes. But none of them was Ras. It felt wrong to even think Ras would be talking to other people. He began to fathom perhaps he had taken too many drugs, or at least too many different kinds of drugs. Downstairs the low dregs of music slammed up through the floor and shook. I want to be so loud, he thought. I want to be so loud, I want to be the only thing, I want to be looked at… 

(I want to be the only thing he looks at) 

Someone had already unfolded the ladder that led up to the attic and there was a permeable sort of membrane of disillusionment charms that sealed the opening. He climbed up, head spinning, everything spinning, went inside. The room was warm and raw with sex and all flesh. So it was indeed true. Someone grabbed his ankle and against his skin the hand felt very warm. 

He made himself focus and search. There were ten or so and beautiful, but none of them was Ras. “Don’t go, Jack,” someone said; he wasn’t sure how they knew his name, but already he was halfway down the stairs. 

I’m losing it, he thought. In his scrambled mind he grasped a couple of nonsense lyrics about jealousy. I’m losing it. He thought he would go to his bedroom and shut and lock the door and write it out. Downstairs he could hear Ian McCulloch singing, “I wanna be one-times-one with you-ou-ou…” 

Ras was in his bedroom sitting in his bed reading through the book he had left out on the side table, which was _To the Lighthouse_. “There you are,” he said, as though this had been planned. “Who’s playing records?” 

“Lupin is.” 

“Are you alright?” 

“I thought you’d be upstairs.” 

“Why would you — ” 

But then he stopped. Jack sat on the side of the bed. Downstairs Lupin had put on “All Tomorrow’s Parties.” 


	2. Chapter 2

II. 

“You’re listening to 90.4 M3MGC North London,” said El from the booth. Behind her Lupin was digging through milk crates of vinyl and brazenly smoking a joint. “I’m El Rice and this is Lunar Broadcast, thank you for joining me on this rainy Tuesday night… I’m joined in the studio by the Hobgoblins, the best new band you haven’t heard of… unless of course you’ve been listening to this show for the past few weeks…” 

“Chuffed you’ve been playing our tape El,” said Ras. In the tiny B studio separated from El’s booth by a wall of decorated glass his voice echoed tinnily. 

“It’s aces is what it is so I just have to know, are you working on new songs?” 

“We wrote the whole tape in October so yes,” Jack said. “We’ve written like twenty songs or so and we learned a ton of covers.” 

“We’re going to go to Hamburg and hone our chops,” said Ras. Behind El in the booth Lupin cackled. 

“Which of you is Lennon and which is McCartney?” 

“Probably we both would aspirationally say Lennon but Ras is definitely McCartney.” 

“It’s true,” Ras said. 

“I don’t feel like — I’m Pete Best,” said Jack. 

“You’re not Pete Best, Jackie; you’re at least Ringo.” 

El laughed. “But you don’t have a drummer.” 

“We have this drum machine that I doctored with magic. It’s very reliable but not very loud.” 

“Interested drummers and bassists are hereby prompted to call on us at home,” Jack announced. “If anyone wants to associate with us again after this. We live on Western Road in Fortis Green.” 

“You’ll be able to tell the house as we’re about to be evicted from it,” Ras said. “Half the front windows are broken.” 

“I’ve heard you two have raucous house parties — but how about a song first, before we get into that?” 

In the tiny room with just the two of them and just the two of them in the booth beyond it was easy to pretend this wasn’t a real gig. El had set up the only spare mic they had in the studio for them and plugged their guitars into her mixing board. The playback in Jack’s headphones was mixed well but he took them off because it struck him as eerie. It felt more familiar to hear his unamplified strumming and his own voice and Ras’s echoing together in the small room. They played “In the Garden” and “Felix Felicis” and a new song they’d finished two nights previous, “Highgate Cemetery,” and an older one of Jack’s, “I Should Have Been a Pair of Ragged Claws.” They had only planned to play those four so when El asked for one last song they were briefly at a loss. 

“We can do a cover,” Jack said. “The machine knows it.” 

El said, “I love how it’s — like a tiny spiritual partner for you guys.” 

“It actually is incredible magic Ras did, like it learns from listening how to play along, and it’ll play back if you beatbox and the like.” 

“If anyone wants to come over and learn how to program a drum machine as such I’ll teach you for three galleons.” 

They played “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend” by John Cale. Jack sang lead and Ras joined him on the chorus. He had taken off his headphones too and their faces were so close Jack could feel the point of Ras’s nose almost in the socket of his closed eye. The cool strands of Ras’s hair that had come down from where he’d tied it back, smooth and fragrant (like smoke and Earl Grey) against his face. Then they played a hardcore version of the Smiths’ “Panic” at double speed and Jack’s voice gave out screaming, hang the blessed DJ… 

“We need a drummer and a bass player,” Ras said breathlessly at the end of the song before El had recovered. “60 Western Road in Fortis Green. Don’t come over before noon and knock loudly.” 

El was saying something like, wow, the Hobgoblins, Ras Boardman and Jack Childermass, their first ever live performance, 90.4 M3MGC FM North London, et cetera et cetera, but Jack’s ears were ringing, and Ras was looking up and into his face and all through him like he was made of gold and covered in soot. He felt certain he would not be able to speak if he tried but he was smiling and the smile felt like it would grow wings and fly away. In the other room with Jack’s camera, at that very moment, Lupin took a photograph of the two of them through the glass which in March 1986 would serve as the image on the back cover of their first LP for Amortentia Records, _With the Hobgoblins_. 

\--

Over the next several days a few musicians showed up at the house though most of them wanted to audition by playing assorted Van Halen or Springsteen numbers. They left their Floo addresses and Jack and Ras promised to contact them but burned the slips of paper after their departure. 

About a week after the radio show Jack went out to the drugstore in the early morning for cigarettes and when he returned there were two girls, or rather he supposed they were women, sitting on the front steps of the house. One was a pale and severe Siouxie type — hair growing out messily from being shaved, black lipstick — and the other was more Jack’s coloring, darkish of skin and hair with a multiplicity of tiny pigtails separated geometrically. Both were smoking unfiltered cigarettes and both wore a mix of black velvet and leather with laddered pantyhose and two-inch creepers. 

“Which one are you,” said the Siouxie one. 

“Jack Childermass.” 

They each shook his hand. 

“Flora St. James.” 

“Imani Rose.” 

“Happy to meet you both but — ” 

“I play drums and Flora plays bass,” said Imani Rose. 

“We were playing with this band at the college called Draught of Living Death but the boys were insufferable.” 

“Potions majors, you know.” 

“El Rice said to listen to her show on Tuesday so we did. Here we are.” 

“Well have you got — ”

“In the car.” 

Flora pointed to a station wagon which was presumably hers, which was parked directly in front of the house. There was a cymbal stand sticking out the window, which was broken and had been patched with plastic sheeting and duct tape. 

“We’re lesbians,” said Imani, out of nowhere. “So you don’t have to worry about anything.” 

Flora elbowed her in a way she probably thought was surreptitious. “You just ought to have girls in your band. Everyone ought to have girls in their band.” 

Jack went inside and woke up Ras, and Imani and Flora brought their equipment in and downstairs to the basement where Jack and Ras had been rehearsing lately (they had soundproofed it with magic from Jack’s shoplifted book, _So You Want To Be A Wizard Rock Star!_ ), together levitating Flora’s intimidatingly massive amp down the rickety stairs. Ras, in his pajamas, watched their coordination, a little hypnotized. He was exceedingly hungover. 

“We play fast and we play loud,” said Imani. Flora played a crushing chord on the bass. “What songs do you guys know?” 

“Um, how about you girls pick.” 

With zero prompting Imani started playing the drumbeat from “Lust for Life.” They must’ve decided together outside or even earlier to play this particular song if prompted. Likely if Jack and Ras hadn’t known it they would’ve up and walked out; after all there was as much at stake for the girls as there was for them. Flora played along, her bass tone was low and heavy and subterranean-feeling, appropriate for the basement. Jack joined in, then Ras. When the vocal kicked in they both ducked instinctively for the mic. Ras’s Iggy Pop impression was better so Jack backed off. He was obliged to go to his amp and turn it up because Flora’s was so fucking loud. 

“That was alright,” said Flora, at the end of it. She was trying to keep from smiling. 

“Want to do a Black Flag song?” Jack asked, testing, feeling like an asshole. He struck the chord that opened “Depression” and Flora followed. She was smirking a little and there was a smudge of black lipstick on her jagged front tooth. 

They played for another half hour then they went upstairs and made tea and had a joint which Imani produced from her pack of cigarettes. Flora dug through Jack and Ras’s stack of records and eventually she put on _Fire of Love_ by the Gun Club. “We don’t make any money,” said Ras. “We’ve written another record’s worth of songs maybe but we’ve no idea what to do with them.” 

“My brother knows a couple people at a few clubs,” Imani said. “But can’t we just play here to get started? Sometimes at the clubs you’ve got to pay to play.” 

“People come party here to take amphetamines and dance.” 

“All you have to do then is write a half hour set of ecstasy and dancing music,” said Flora. “Play some Duran Duran covers.” 

“Can either of you sing?” 

“Hell fucking no.” 

“Well we have everything we’ve written recorded on cassette,” Jack said. “You can take copies of the tapes home and learn the songs.” 

“Or you can practice here and we can teach you.” 

“If you have anything you want us to learn you can bring it in,” Jack told them, feeling magnanimous. 

“D’you really mean that.” 

“Of course I do,” said Jack, though he regretted it, and Ras was looking at him out of the corner of his eye. 

\--

“Pretty girls,” said Ras. 

“They’re gay,” Jack said. “Don’t get ideas.” 

“I have no ideas. I’m certain they could both murder me and probably would gladly if I crossed them.” 

Jack was making two grilled cheeses at the stove and Ras was standing beside him at the counter. Eventually he leaned in and pressed his forehead against Jack’s shoulder and closed his eyes. 

“What is it?” 

“Well it’s going to be different from here on out.” 

“Who says it’s going to be different,” said Jack, as though he had not been thinking the same thing. He didn’t want to move but had to in order to flip the grilled cheeses. “We’re going to write songs like we always do then we can bring them to the girls. They don’t live here with us. We invite them over on our own terms.” 

“They’re brilliant,” Ras said. “Brilliant musicians.” 

“I’m not going to throw you over for them. Are you going to throw me over for them?” 

“Of course not.” 

“So there. Stop worrying about it. You can make things true by worrying.” 

They didn’t speak about it anymore that night or for another couple weeks. They sat at the table and ate the grilled cheeses and then they went in the basement and worked, sitting back to back on the damp concrete floor, on some of the new songs. 

\--

Imani and Flora learned the songs on their own in their Kensington flat in two weeks and then the full lineup rehearsed together for another week at the house in Fortis Green. Imani and Flora had three songs they brought in for Jack and Ras to work with, two of which would wind up on _With the Hobgoblins_ , and one of which, “It’s Feast Day in Hell,” they played live for years as a quartet before it was at last released on the girls’ first record as Saint Rose, _Severe Asceticism_ , in 1992. 

In the end of May the Hobgoblins played another gig on Lunar Broadcast with five new songs and a cover they had just learned of Wire’s “A Mutual Friend.” “When are you guys going to play somewhere besides my radio show,” El asked when they had finished the set. 

“Funny you should ask,” Flora said. 

“This Friday we’re throwing a party at our place,” Ras said. “Our set is at midnight. We’re all DJing and so is Lupin.” 

“Am I really,” said Lupin from the booth. 

“It’ll be a rip-roarin’ good time and we’ve saved all our danceable new cuts for the proceedings.” 

“You guys have danceable cuts now?” 

“We made Imani play disco drums,” Jack said. 

She kicked up a few seconds’ flashy sparking rhythm. “How do you feel about that, Imani?” El asked. 

Ras passed her the mic. “Bloody murderous,” she said. Everyone laughed. “One or both of the boys would be dead if the songs didn’t sound so good.” 

“What can you tell us about playing with Jack and Ras?” 

Imani passed the mic to Flora, who said, “They can read each others’ minds it seems and then we have to figure it out by suggestion. It’s bloody frustrating but it gives us the leeway to play what we want. In the last band we were in the boys didn’t let us play what we wanted.” 

“This band is genderless,” said Ras. “We’re a coven of — magical brethren.” 

Flora cackled. 

“You heard it here first folks,” said El in the other room. “Hobgoblins — a coven of magical brethren. How about one more song?” 

They played one of Imani and Flora’s, “End of the River.” The girls had written all the music and the chorus about a weekend trip they had taken just after meeting each other to the dry spring at Thames Head; Jack had finished it with lyrics about meeting Ras for the first time on the steps of the Anthropology building at MGC, except via _Brideshead Revisited_. There was a lyric about the wines being too various. 

\--

On Friday afternoon Ras and Jack and Imani and Flora moved all their amps and equipment up out of the basement and into the kitchen, which was the easiest room to magically soundproof. El Rice and Lupin arrived around six with takeout curry, carrying between them a milk crate of records; they helped finish the soundproofing and magical cushioning of Boardman family heirlooms in the kitchen and drawing room and on the stairs. Imani and Flora made a fluorescent punch they called Fool’s Amortentia. To Jack it smelled like vodka and pomegranate juice with a hint of tarragon; this was all true, but it also included an entire Befuddlement Draught’s worth of lovage. Then the four of them put together the setlist. They planned to play for a half hour then continue if they hadn’t yet cleared the room by that point. It was a trick of arranging the dance tracks with the punk ones. They planned to close the set with “In the Garden” and the double-time cover of “Panic.” 

Folks started arriving at around nine-thirty, and El started DJing with Pet Shop Boys’ “West End Girls.” Imani and Flora were quickly obliged to make another batch of punch. Jack and Ras entertained guests in the kitchen mostly to make sure none of their equipment was stolen. A girl who had been in Jack’s Hogwarts astronomy class a lifetime ago came over to say hello and very soon she had tenderly wrapped his shoulder in one narrow and beringed hand and said, “You know I never believed all those horrible things Professor Bryce said about you.” 

Jack could feel Ras watching him with a confused intensity from across the room. “Only the worst are true,” he said. 

“You were very brave to come back to school after all that. What house were you again?” 

“Hufflepuff.” 

“No!” 

He had long ago gotten over the slights and jokes other Hogwarts students often made with regard to his house. “They put the hat on my head and it was so quiet like, I thought I’d broken it. But really it was just it couldn’t decide.” 

“What house was Rastaban in?” 

He didn’t remember if he had ever heard anyone call Ras by his full name before. Even the lawyers called him “Mr. Boardman.” 

“He went to a private boarding school in America for the sons and daughters of the very posh. But I’m certain he would’ve been Slytherin. His blood’s very old and he’s disastrously ambitious.” 

The girl laughed and Jack laughed. As if on cue Ras came over to introduce himself in three clunky Doc Martens footsteps. He got touchy when he was jealous. Jack had been trying to write a song about it but was wary of venturing accidentally into pornography. You have to leave some room for speculation, he remembered Ras telling him. 

Around eleven-thirty it was becoming very difficult to walk around in the house, it was hot as hell despite about thirty different and competing air conditioning charms in every corner, and Lupin had taken over DJing with R.E.M.’s “Radio Free Europe.” Imani, with a joint in her mouth, had spent an hour diligently tightening her drum heads. When she looked up at Jack and smiled it was the first time he realized she too was nervous. He himself had done a bump of coke with Lupin off his keys and was feeling exhilarated beyond even the norm. Like he was a child again and had been rolling down hills. Ras was talking to his sister Whyland, who had come from night school and wore a skirt suit; she was smoking clove cigarettes, and she looked almost uncannily like Ras but even more severe. Jack had met Whyland once before in a pub near where she lived in one of the Boardmans’ other London properties in Crouch End and had fallen instantly in love with her for obvious reasons and because she looked like she could, and gladly would, crush him underneath her heel. 

At midnight precisely Lupin faded out the end of the Slits’ cover of “Heard It Through the Grapevine” and Jack and Flora struck an almost-tandem and blisteringly loud chord. Imani set into a snappy and complex military roll on her kit and Ras yelled just away from the mic, “Welcome to witching hour with the Hobgoblins!” 

Later the last thing Jack would remember was looking around at the smoky kitchen and seeing a score of pale sweaty faces jostling in the doorway like something out of a James Ensor painting. Ras whose eyes met his like a kind of atavistic tectonic puzzle snapping together. The sound of Imani’s drums as they launched into the new disco version of “Felix Felicis.” 

Then not much. 

\--

It came back to him at the end of the set when he was lying on the floor for some reason and Ras, who was beaming and his smile like a lighthouse in his face, reached down to help him up. The kitchen was packed still and the feedback was like a living creature holding them all in its belly and the clock on the wall said 1:36am. All the crowd was screaming, even Whyland. he had scarcely regained his feet when Ras embraced him tightly and the pickups of their guitars pressed together wailing. Jack felt his knees buckle, just a little; the weight of it was so much, like the most he had ever carried. The bony snake of Flora’s spine pressed against his. Behind him she had shoved the headstock of her bass against the kitchen floor and was making horrible sounds with it. Imani was standing on her bass drum barefoot shaking three tambourines in a fist. 

Jack pressed as tightly against Ras as he could. His nose in Ras’s sweaty neck just behind his ear where he smelled like the bad cologne he used when he hadn’t showered, and like smoke and Earl Grey tea. He took hold in one hand of the bodies of both guitars and pressed them together. It felt not unlike sex if he was being honest. 

\--

El and Lupin had stood together in the back with an eye on the drawing room stereo during the Hobgoblins set, but when Jack returned to the drawing room where Imani and Flora were DJing (after being waylaid in the kitchen by Whyland) he saw El was dancing with a handsome and long-haired Indian boy who was holding her hips. Lupin for his part was alone outside on the steps when Jack went out about twenty minutes later for a cigarette and some quiet. He smelled overwhelmingly of pot and tequila and low in the sky the cheese wedge of moon was a growing half. When Jack sat with him Lupin looked at him and his flicker of recognition was quick and bare. Then he looked back up toward the moon again. “Your set was incredible,” said Lupin. 

“Thank you, you know, couldn’t’ve done it without you and El.” 

His mouth twisted at the sound of her name. Jack resolved not to push but Lupin didn’t need pushing. “She likes me,” he said weakly. Jack had never seen him so wasted. “But they locked my heart up, in a stone — a stone cage. More for the public good than for my own I guess.” 

“Well what happened?” 

“Whatever else ever happened in the war. Death and betrayal and betrayal and death.” 

It was like a bolt of light came out from the clouds casting a moving wash of gold upon the black sea. “Ah,” said Jack, like an idiot. “Well — ” 

“Stop — Jack. I can’t talk about it. Least of all with you.” 

“Why’s that?” 

“You’ll write a fucking song about it. But it’ll turn into — about you and Ras.” 

He didn’t say anything. He waited. He knew he would go after this and write the song about himself and Ras. 

“To think I thought it was the worst it could get when you were trying for like days on end to learn to play ‘I Wanna Be Your Dog,’” Lupin said. He patted his front pocket absently but found no cigarettes so Jack supplied him with one. “Then you played ‘A Mutual Friend’ on the radio. Now this bloody rubbish.” 

Jack couldn’t help but laugh and instantly he regretted it. Lupin smiled a little but he pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“It was like a bolt of fucking lightning. And you know he would’ve liked your music.” A cold thread — spooling in his gut. Dread or something. Lupin went on. “Ras is of a not dissimilar kind. I hate to say it but I don’t envy you.” 

“I wouldn’t,” Jack lied. “No one should.” 

“I’d ask you what you thought you were doing but I doubt you know.” 

“It’s true. I don’t know.” He put his hand high on Lupin’s shoulder and under his palm the bone and muscle jumped. “Remus,” he said; he doubted he had never called Lupin by his first name before. “Let me get a Portkey and take you home.” 

“Home.” 

“Back to your and El’s flat. We’ll see if she can come with.” 

They went inside (Jack held Lupin’s elbow) and found El, who abandoned her dance partner when she saw the state Lupin was in. Jack made them a Portkey with a crushed beer can and waited with them trying unsuccessfully to make small talk until they disappeared. Imani and Flora were playing Dead Can Dance on the turntable for the remaining stragglers who weren’t passed out or groping each other in the corners, and Jack climbed the stairs to his room. Ras was in there, sitting in Jack’s unmade bed shirtless, playing the Stones’ “Play With Fire” on his guitar. His hair was still sweaty about his forehead and the nape of his neck. 

“Shoes,” Jack said, “in my bed.” He held out his hand and Ras put the neck of the guitar in it. But he didn’t take his shoes out of the bed. “Going to tell the girls to cut the music at three.” 

“No bother,” said Ras. He leaned back against the headboard and closed his eyes. The light coming in off the street painted his skin swaths of blue and yellow. “What d’you think will come of tonight.” 

Jack was trying already to pick out a riff he’d written on the guitar. It sounded like Gang of Four to him, probably because he was still a little high, so he tried to make it flow. “Don’t get your hopes up,” he told Ras. 

He felt Ras look at him, but he didn’t respond. Instead he said, “What are you playing?” 

“Just a thing.” 

“Sounds — ” he sang a kind of falling rhythm and Jack followed it. “That’s the bridge.” 

“Right.” 

He played again from the start and tried to sing: 

_They locked my heart up in a stone cage  
_ _For the bloody good of the modern age_

“It’s so Joy Division,” said Ras.

“Shut up.” 

“Play it like one third faster. But keep it slidey.” 

Jack did. “Now it sounds like ‘Disorder.’” 

“That’s fine. That’s their best song.” 

_I don’t know if I can manage to right all of your wrongs  
_ _I’ve been good as dead now for so long  
_ _But you would have liked their pretty songs_

“I’ve got the spirit,” Ras sang, “but lose the feeling — ”

“Shut up,” Jack said again, but he was laughing. Ras held his hand out and Jack put the guitar neck in it. “Let’s see if you can do better.” 

He played the riff more staccato and blistering double the speed Jack had played at first. 

_You locked my heart up in a stone cage  
_ _For the bloody good of the modern age  
_ _You tied me up like the tide to the moon  
_ _But you were gone so soon_

“You sound like you’re singing Black Flag as Barry Manilow,” said Ras, stopping. “It can’t be a sad song. It has to be an angry song. The lyrics are good but you have to sound vengeful.” 

_With a dull knife you ripped my soul free  
_ _You brought it to an island in the North Sea  
_ _I won’t put right everything you wronged  
_ _I’ve been good as dead now for so long  
_ _You would’ve liked their pretty songs_

“That’s it,” Ras said. Almost tender, like to a lover, but accomplished. 

_I believed all the lies you told me  
_ _I kissed the lips that sold me out  
_ _When I said I wanted to be your dog…  
_ _They can take your soul and mine with it  
_ _Fuck your bullshit  
_ _Fuck all of it_

Ras was beaming at him. Downstairs thumping up through the floor he heard that Imani and Flora were playing Bauhaus. “Where’d that come from!” 

“I had the weirdest talk with Lupin,” Jack started, but Ras was already playing the line out of the chorus and into a second verse. By the time they had written that it was four-thirty in the morning and the music downstairs had stopped. They completed the song that day and recorded it in the evening and shared the tape with Imani and Flora, who made it sound even less like Joy Division. “When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog” eventually became the first single off _With the Hobgoblins,_ released to Wizarding Wireless radio and on cassingle in November 1985, then as track 6 on the record in March 1986; after its release, Lupin didn’t speak to Jack until he came to visit him in Byberry Prison in 1993.

\--

All that week they got owls from partygoers who wanted to know when the next show was and/or had enclosed seven sickles in exchange for a cassette tape, but none of the letters contained an offer of a reputable place to play a show and nor did any of them contain a record contract. Jack had expected neither (as had Imani and Flora) but it became rapidly clear that Ras had expected both. He didn’t leave his room much for a few days but could be heard playing guitar on occasion and when Jack knocked and asked to come in Ras suggested with a cloying politeness that perhaps he should come back a little later. Pointedly, Jack listened to _Let it Be_ on the stereo and copied _In the Garden with the Hobgoblins_ cassettes and smoked cigarettes. He took photographs of the post-party wreckage of their house and developed them in the downstairs bathroom which he had long since co-opted for such purposes and made another zine (he titled it _Europe_ _After the Rain_ after the Max Ernst painting) which he brought around to the bookstores and to the MGC library. Lupin wasn’t there and anyway Jack wasn’t sure he could face him. 

Ten days or so after the gig he knocked on Ras’s door and Ras told him to go away but he went in. He had brought with him his guitar and two beers and a bag of crisps. The truth was he was lonely and bored and he had come up with some song ideas by himself but it was no fun to work on them without Ras. “What are you doing in here?” 

“Languishing in misery,” said Ras. He was sitting in his four-poster bed in a pair of patterned silken pants and nothing else, looking like a drunken crown prince deposed in a scandal. His guitar was leaning up against the headboard beside him like an ignored lover. The room smelled overpoweringly of whiskey and pot and there were a few empty baggies having once contained cocaine on the side table. Accordingly Ras looked as though he had not slept with any kind of actual restfulness since the party. “Writing,” he went on, “a little. Depressing fucking bullshit.” 

Jack went and sat with him in the bed and opened the beers against the headboard. Ras took one; his hands were clammy and trembling. 

“Maybe don’t, ah… take a little break from the coke alright, so you can sleep?” 

“I can’t sleep with or without the coke,” said Ras miserably. 

Jack left it. “Do you want to play for me some of what you’ve written?” 

“No.” 

“Well why not?” 

“Jack…” 

He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. Jack looked at him — his skin, and his hair. He smelled unshowered and sharp and scared and for the first time in their acquaintance (a whirlwind, a lifetime, six months) Jack thought perhaps the edge of Ras’s madness he’d noticed upon their first meeting might be a bit of a complication. 

“This has to work, Jack.” 

“Well of course it’ll — ”

“Stop talking. You don’t have as much riding on this as I do.” 

“I dropped out of school too,” Jack reminded him. 

“You were like half a semester in and you can always go back. And your family doesn’t care.” Jack bit his lip; this was not the time to tell Ras, one’s family not giving a single apparent fuck about one wasn’t exactly a recipe for carefree joy. “I turned down my only other option. They’re grooming Whyland for the chair now and lord knows she’d be better at it than me anyway.” 

“It’s going to work, love, the band is, I know it, but you know we can’t just play one gig for fifty people and expect to become Celestina Warbeck overnight.” 

That made Ras laugh, which Jack had known it would. “We’re not covering ‘A Cauldron Full of Hot, Strong Love.’” 

“I don’t want to do anything else anymore either and it scares me too. It’s like — standing on the edge of the black hole again. But this time I have a broomstick that flies. And I’m with you.” 

“How do you know it flies.” 

“You don’t know unless you jump.” 

Ras looked away. “Sometimes I feel like this is fucking suicide.” 

“Well perhaps it is. I’ve been telling you I want to write a song like ‘Rocket USA’ — ” 

“You know what I mean.” 

He didn’t like this path. It was like a dark winding stair and once it had been started up it couldn’t be got down again. 

“It either works, or death,” Ras said. “Or it works, and death.” They looked at each other for a moment in the silence, and then Ras reached over to the side table for his cigarettes and his overflowing ashtray. “Quit looking at me like I’ve run over your dog,” he said when he looked up at Jack again. “You know it’s true.” 

“It freaks me out when you say that sort of stuff. Can’t I say that to you?” 

“Lots of things you do freak me out.” 

Jack laughed but it was cold and bitter. “Like what?” 

“When you take like eight different sorts of pills at once.” He mimicked Jack’s tone: “Can’t I say that to you?” 

“I’ve never — it’s not _eight_.” 

“Semantics…” 

“Well I’m not doing it and gleefully talking about suicide.” 

“Do I sound gleeful to you?” 

He tried to drop it. “That was the wrong word. And anyway I can — I’ll stop. At the next party I’ll just do coke and just to stay awake. Alright?” 

Ras lit a cigarette and exhaled an artful silver-grey stream as punctuation. “I’ll believe it when I see it.” 

“You had best fucking believe it.” He took one of Ras’s cigarettes and summoned a flame into his hand. “I’m in this with you, you know, this is our, like, our blood and tears, and I love you, and I don’t intend on dying before I’m thirty. When you talk that way you’re talking about me too I hope you know.” 

“You love me,” said Ras. Like a conniving muse. 

“Yes, idiot. You love me also; I can tell.” 

“How can you can tell? No one’s ever loved you before.” 

“That’s how I can tell.” 

It felt like committing seppuku in Ras’s bed. He wondered if this would happen again. If this would be necessary every time. 

“I love you too,” Ras said at last. “Obviously. You’re like — we’ve known each other since the beginning of time.” 

“Write a bloody song about it.” 

“I have. I’ve like fifteen of them.” 

“Play me one, then.” 

“I can’t. They’re not finished.” 

Ras leant forward to stub out his cigarette in the ashtray. He was so tired. There was a different and lesser kind of life in him. Jack got up and embraced him and kissed his temple where his hair was very dark and soft. Ras’s hands were balled weak fists against his chest. His eyelashes fluttered. It seemed like the right thing to do. Then Jack went down to his room and dug around in his trunk until he found one of the old Sleeping Draughts (since expired, but unopened) he’d bought during the Event of his seventh year at Hogwarts. He poured it into a crystal goblet (formerly containing beer) left by his bedside and brought it upstairs for Ras. 

“What’s that.” 

“Nevermind what it is. Go on and drink it.” 

Ras did. About thirty seconds later he said, “Son of a bitch.” Then he fell asleep. 

Jack sat in the bed and had another one of Ras’s cigarettes and fooled around on the guitar. He played Joy Division’s “Disorder” and then messed around with a song he’d been working on. It would exist until his first solo record in 1995 only as a demo passed around among fans on cassette tape and speculated about heavily. The recorded version was called “Sugarman’s,” after the brand of Sleeping Draught Jack had preferred at Hogwarts and kept lying around for Ras throughout the rest of the 1980s. The demo had no title but the bridge was, “No one’s ever loved you before…” 

He fell asleep eventually at the end of Ras’s bed like a dog. In the morning he woke up when Ras lit a cigarette. Sometime in the night it appeared he had gotten up and thrown one of his knit blankets over Jack. It was around nine and the earliest he could remember being awake in months. “Let’s give each other tattoos,” said Ras. 

“What?” 

“It’s not hard. All you need is ink and a sewing needle and we have both.” Indeed, they had raided the sewing supply store a few streets over several weeks previous after a trip to the thrift store another few streets over where they had purchased an estate sale’s worth of deeply ‘70s glam fashions which were so inexpensive because they were ripped all over. As for the ink Jack had begun to use it when he made zines of his photographs. “You can’t be a punk without a single tattoo, love.” 

“Are we really punks.” 

“I could hear you playing Crass last night in my dreams.” 

He smiled like an idiot. He went and got the ink and Ras the needles which they sterilized with magic and then they sat so close in the bed he could smell Ras’s morning breath and sleep and his old fear. 

“What should they say?” 

“In the garden,” said Ras, as though it were very obvious, which Jack supposed it was. He did Ras’s tattoo first, above-inside his elbow, and then Ras did his, on the back of his wrist. It hurt a little but not really. He could feel his pulse beating like a minimalist opera against Ras’s hand. 

\--

Over the next few months they played another gig in the house — this time, they had to turn folks away at the front door, and it was so hot that Imani almost fainted and they had to take a half hour break in the middle of the set, and Jack, true to his promise, only did coke, though he definitely did too much coke — and they also played another live set on Lunar Broadcast. El had built a kind of magical contraption for the transmitter that allowed her to see how many wizarding wireless devices were tuned in at any given time, and despite it being summer session and the campus fairly vacant, at the high point they had 143 listeners. By September 1 they had recorded a full cassette of the demos that would eventually become _With the Hobgoblins,_ and Jack had (rather ambitiously, given they had no idea how to so much as put themselves forth to wizarding record companies) designed the full booklet, including the text beneath the tracklisting: 

_All songs by Boardman/Childermass with St. James/Rose, except tracks 7 and 13 by St. James/Rose with Boardman/Childermass._

“Fine,” said Flora flatly when she saw it, though she was smiling, and then she rubbed her hand over Jack’s shoulders. “You two are so handsome in that picture.” 

He hadn’t quite forgotten about Ras’s week of nihilism but had figured it was conditional on his lack of sleep and wouldn’t happen again as long as he kept tabs on it. His understanding of the complete endeavor changed radically when he came home one afternoon from a run to the record stores and bookshops that carried his zines, and Ras was gone. He had left a letter on Jack’s bed: 

_So so so so so very sorry to do this. I kept getting the feeling I could hurt myself. I try to tell you all this stuff but I feel like I never can until it’s too late and that makes it worse. Like that I can’t even speak to you about it. Everything I can’t talk to you about is like a termite that chews at me. Whyland is here with me now and I’m going to her place in a little while. Come by and visit or write if you can. It’s 12 Coleridge in Crouch End. I’ll be back soon but I just don’t know. It’s nothing to do with you and I don’t regret any of what we’re doing. I only wish I could have two lives._

_I love you, RQB_

Jack read the letter three times over and had a cigarette. Everything was buzzing burning. Like having taken too many pills. His breath felt like a kind of foreign possessor. He went downstairs and out the door. Already it was beginning to feel and taste like autumn — the soft and fragrant rotting cold thing about the air. Goosebumps stood up on his arms and on the back of his neck. He walked to the crossroads and got on the tube. A gaggle of Muggle schoolgirls in their plaid and pleats watched him as though he were a kind of human bomb. 

He got off at Chalk Farm station and walked to Bad Magic Records. Aspirationally he had gone a few months previous in attempt to peddle some zines and tapes only to be turned away by the owner, who, of course, was again behind the counter, smoking a cigarette. “Childermass,” he said, with mild contempt, when he saw Jack in the door. “Before you even break out your latest publication — ” 

“This isn’t about that.” 

“Ah, well, before you break out your band’s latest cassette — ” 

“I want a show. I want to play a gig here. We _need_ to play a gig here.” 

In the silence that followed Jack could hear _Ege Bamyasi_ on the stereo. 

“We’ve played two gigs in our house where people couldn’t get in the room,” he continued. “And we’ve played thrice on the MGC student radio to two hundred listeners each time.” This was, of course, a mild exaggeration. “You can take one hundred percent from the door. We don’t need the money. We just need to play here.” 

“If you _don’t need the money_ can’t you pay to play at one of the Camden clubs?” 

Jack’s wand up his sleeve was itching. He hadn’t hexed anyone since school but he was sorely tempted. He’d always been a dab hand with a Bat Bogey hex (he had performed perhaps his most powerful one wandlessly in his final conversation with the professor before he had appealed his expulsion). “We need this. This place has a reputation.” 

The owner was quiet for a moment. Finally he said, “It seems I have something that you allegedly need. And you have nothing meaningful that you can offer me besides your shitty band.” 

“We’re a lot better now than on the cassette,” said Jack. “We have a bassist and a drummer these days and real amps and all of it. I told you two hundred people listened to us on the radio and you can have all the earnings from the door. Or if you’d rather get a blowjob I’m good for that too.” 

The owner laughed. “I’m sure you are,” he said. He studied Jack in a way that suggested appraisal for parts. “Here’s the deal, Childermass. I can give you a gig in three weeks — Monday, October 4. 10pm, no support. If you can sell this place out and make me — let’s say, ten galleons in record sales, I will consider letting you play another show here on a weekend night and keeping 20% of the door. If you cannot sell this place out and do not make me ten galleons in record sales…” His face twisted in tandem with Jack’s stomach. “— there will be much, much more than a blowjob on the table, do you understand?” 

\--

On the way home he went by the college. It was a Tuesday night and so El Rice was getting ready for her show, helping a young hippie girl with several marimbas mic her elaborate setup. “Hey!” she said, elated to see him. When she went to embrace him he feared for a split second that something about him would stain her white Raincoats shirt. “What’s up, Jack?” 

“I just — we need a quick favor.” 

“What is it?” 

“I just got us a gig at Bad Magic Records. October 4 — two weeks from next Monday, 10pm. Do you think you could talk about it on your show? And could you — if you don’t mind, if you can talk to any of the other DJs — ” 

El had written it all down in a binder she kept by the record player. “We keep upcoming gigs in there and anyone with a show can read it on air. I know other folks have been playing your guys cassette and your live recordings so — ” She caught eye of the girl in the other room. “Morrigan, you can’t use that mic — ” 

“We’ve got to sell it out. If we do we might be able to play there again. I’m afraid I had to make rather a devil’s bargain with the owner.” 

“That guy’s a sack of shit. A fucking sexist pig.” 

Jack laughed a little to keep from screaming. “In that case Imani and Flora might kill him and we won’t have to worry about any of it.” 

“I’ll do everything I can to help you,” El said. “You might also make a flyer and hang it around campus and at the other magic schools in London. Diagon Alley, Knockturn Alley… one of the other student orgs here has a list of public wizarding billboards around London. I can try and hunt it down for you and send it over by owl. Between the four of you — and I know you’re an artist. You should be able to advertise all over.” 

“Yes, well. Yes, the four of us. Thank you.” 

“Of course. Like your tattoo by the way.” 

She smiled; he smiled back, but it felt wrong. Like a half-thing or a lie. He would trace, later in his life, very much to this moment. He turned on his heel and went out and took the tube, heart slamming, to Whyland’s in Crouch End. 


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the music from chapters 3 and 4 is linked [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/153383958085/just-posted-chapters-three-and-four-of-a-handful).

III. 

The second time the Hobgoblins played at Bad Magic Records was on a cold Friday night in December 1984, supporting the Weird Sisters, the biggest rock band in wizarding London. Jack had privately had it out with the owner on the subject, as their initial conversation on the subject had included nothing about being a support act at the promised weekend show. But it did explain why they were only getting 20% of the door proceeds. “Listen,” he had said, “Jackie. If you want a headline show we can discuss… terms.” 

Instead Jack talked to Ras and Imani and Flora to tell them all they had to play the best show of their lives with the Weird Sisters with the angle of perhaps being asked to open for them in other wizarding rock clubs in London. As such they had to play all their best and fastest sexiest songs and they had to look staggeringly beautiful. They spent all the week previous at the thrift shops in Camden and Kensington and driving through the suburbs in Flora’s station wagon in search of estate sales, listening to a Smiths cassette and doing “vocal exercises,” eg. Morrissey impressions. At one of the estate sales Imani bought five Patsy Cline vinyl LPs and alligator boots, and Ras bought a moth-eaten white fur coat. Jack wanted to buy a marimba but was dearly fucking broke as he’d been obliged to spend ten galleons on records at their first Bad Magic show so as to avoid prostituting himself. The good news was that, because of this, he had finally purchased R.E.M.’s _Murmur_ , and a copy of a mysterious cassette tape, _For All the Fucked Up Children of This World_ by Spacemen 3. 

They four of them spent Friday in the house in Fortis Green listening to _Velvet Underground & Nico _and smoking joints and trying to plot the setlist. There would be two covers — the double-time “Panic,” tacked onto the denouement of “End of the River,” and a new cover they’d just learned, Bowie’s “Queen Bitch” — and the rest would be originals, mostly the dance-y versions from their house shows and the newer, rawer, punker cuts they’d written since Ras had come back from living two months-ish at Whyland’s. They got dressed, and Flora did Jack’s makeup whilst Ras and Imani watched in the door, then they drove to Bad Magic with the drums and the guitars jammed into the trunk and the hatch held shut with a couple spells. 

El Rice took a series of photographs of the band at this show which she later published in a chapbook called _1984-7 with the Hobgoblins,_ which sold out functionally instantly upon its release and thus paid almost entirely for El’s masters’ degree in broadcast magic from the wizarding graduate school at Cambridge. Imani and Flora were dressed in their usual head-to-toe black but Imani wore the alligator boots and had coaxed her hair into an afro which she had stuck full of charms for light and false jewels so that it lit up on occasion like a thundercloud, and Flora had done her nails and lips and eye makeup in vivid bloody red. They had decided Jack should go for a kind of Joe Strummer look so he wore jeans and boots and an oversize flannel button-down, torn at the elbows and cuffed past his wrists, unbuttoned halfway down to his navel, with a selection of estate sale and thrift store jewelry the rest of the three of them had curated. One of them was his early Christmas present from Ras, from a shop in Knockturn Alley: a single curved and milk-red dragon tooth on a very fine gold strand. Ras had wanted to wear a dress initially but had decided against it mostly because he had become self-conscious about his knees. So instead he wore a big black tank he usually slept in, and overalls, and the huge white fur coat. He looked like David Bowie as a Village Person. Sometime at Whyland’s he had cut his hair short and uneven and it had not yet quite grown back out so there was also a touch of escaped mental patient about him. 

As at their house shows and at the MGC radio station there was only one mic which they were obliged to share. Jack was the soberest he had ever been performing before mostly because of his residual skittishness around the shop owner and so when they ducked in to sing together he felt the flash of cameras and the crowd’s swarming manifest eyes and Ras’s breath against his cheek and Ras’s hair against his face, and found he could not entirely be bothered to care. The trick was to treat it like it was only the two of them together in a room singing to one another, which anyway it usually was. 

The image of them on the cover of El’s book was one she considered a spiritual sibling to the photograph Lupin had taken of them in the MGC studio, which ended up on the reverse cover of _With the Hobgoblins_. She had snapped it at the tail end of their set as they covered “Queen Bitch,” which they would go on to cover at nearly every show they played almost until the end of their career. Their look at each other was like ouroboros infinity. It flowed in a kind of captive circle. There was no way to remember what part of the song El had captured, but Jack thought he remembered he had been singing, “Oh God I could do better than that…” 

Afterward they were all four standing outside together sharing a joint and waiting for the Weird Sisters set. El took a few more photos which they later would use in the liner booklet for the 1992 CD reissue, designed by Imani whilst Jack was in prison. Jack had taken his shirt off and left it inside by mistake, so Ras had sheltered him in half the white fur coat. They were standing together as such, giddy, laughing; Flora was telling a filthy joke, and Imani was carefully taking all the spells out of her hair, and Ras was musically rattling all Jack’s necklaces together, when Myron Wagtail and Kirley McCormack of the Weird Sisters came outside for a cigarette. 

“Break a leg!” Imani called. “Play ‘Grindylow Blues’ for us.” 

Wagtail and McCormack looked at them. Sweaty and a mess, makeup running, hands full of magic, breathless and high, ears ringing, in mothball smelling clothes; two women, two dark-skinned kids, a butch girl in construction boots, and the scion of the oldest wizarding dynasty in Great Britain, aside from the Peverells. More like a painting by Goya or Bosch or Ensor than Caravaggio. 

“Thanks,” said McCormack. He and Wagtail set off down the block. 

For a little while none of the four of them spoke. Then Flora spit on the concrete. 

\--

Whyland had established strict rules. Chief among them was that Jack was not allowed to sleep over. She had helped her brother through his assorted cases of the sullens since they were children and besides she was dating a boy who happened to be studying to be a magical psychologist and had borrowed select among his textbooks. On his own in Fortis Green Jack took photographs and arranged other photographs into zines and wrote songs and made posters and listened to Throbbing Gristle. Flora came over once or twice and they jammed for a while and then they took the tube down to meet Imani at her day job (she waited tables during the breakfast rush at a wizarding diner called Ignatius’s just off Diagon Alley) and walked around London hanging show posters. Inevitably he would end up over at Whyland’s where she at last condescended to allow him to Apparate directly into the living room. 

Whyland spent much of her time with her magnificent head in the Floo, shouting incoherently. She was fond of smart (tight) wool suits and clove cigarettes and Graham Greene novels. It seemed she was struggling to reconcile her worry for her brother’s mental health with her hopes the band would take off and her appreciation of the tapes Ras had given her, which were stacked up next to her stereo. Ras had told her about the October 4th show and so Jack gave her posters to hang up around her campus; in the end a good quarter of the audience looked as though they had come straight from a mock trial. 

Ras spent much of his time in the upstairs suite Whyland had allotted for his purposes smoking weed in the bathtub. Jack sat with him on the floral throw rug and the cold tile floor playing guitar. By this method they wrote “Sympathy for Brian Wilson,” the eight-minute closer and latest track on _With the Hobgoblins,_ and “The Rainveil,” track 4 on their second LP, _Erebus and Terror_. Otherwise they went out walking to Alexandra Park or Hampstead Heath where they would eat mushrooms and sit in the grass despite the growing autumn chill, sharing cigarettes and eating bread and cheese like truants from Oxford in a Victorian novel. What Jack had wagered to get the show at Bad Magic was always on the back of his tongue but he never said it. He figured perhaps he would tell Ras about it when he was doing better. It seemed important that he believe they had gotten the gig on the merit of their music rather than on Jack’s apparent sex appeal to lecherous older men. Regardless it was the first secret about the band he had kept from Ras and as such it felt wrong, though he told himself it was only fair because Ras was keeping secrets from him in turn. 

But Ras’s secrets were of a private ilk. He was constantly picking at the skin around his nails. He told Jack he couldn’t stand to stay at Whyland’s and wanted desperately to come home but nothing came of it. “What’s the worst you’ve ever felt in your life,” he asked Jack once, just a few days before the October 4th show, as they were tripping in Regents’ Park. 

Right now, Jack did not say. “Living in my rented room in Hogsmeade while I appealed my expulsion.” 

“I never asked you how that whole thing got found out.” 

“It wasn’t anything — it wasn’t like I was caught on my knees or any of it. But I was in his office when I had no other reason to be. We were just talking but. In retrospect it was altogether very clear. He had a good bottle of claret out. It happened so fast I hardly remember it now. My Transfiguration professor came barging in and saw us and the next thing I know they’ve convened the board. Anyway then I had to testify about all of it. By then I guess it had been — well it started in my sixth year. There were letters over the summer. It was all a very grand humiliation and I am completely certain there are still members of the board who wank over it.” 

“Literally, or — ”

“Oh yes, literally.” 

“Write a song for them.” 

“I’m trying. Crass already did ‘Chairman of the Bored.’ But why, you know, what’s the worst you ever felt in _your_ life?” 

“Just the other day when I came to Whyland’s,” Ras said. “It feels like — I think you should be able to read my mind. But you can’t. And I can’t say a lot of things aloud.” 

“Why can’t you?” 

“Because they're not finished.” 

“I hear your unfinished songs all the time,” Jack said, but he knew it was different. 

“There’s this spongy raw place in my brain,” Ras said. “I can feel it now. Something’s wrong with it. But I don’t know exactly what that is. It ruins almost everything for me to tell you the truth.” 

“Well it can’t ruin this.” 

“No?” 

“No, you know, this comes from there.” 

“I’m not of the school that believes you have to be crazy to be an artist.” 

“You do have to have something a little wrong with you. To willingly jump off the cliff of it like I keep saying.” 

“I had that feeling just the other day,” Ras said. “The one you keep talking about. I had a dream we were together and you said we should walk into the sun. Just to be doing something together.” 

“What did you do?” 

“Well obviously I said of course. So we did, and then I woke up.” 

\--

Shortly thereafter the no-go with the Weird Sisters they played a New Years’ Eve house show. As such Jack woke up on New Years’ Day around three in the afternoon on the living room floor with his head on Flora’s calf when she yanked it out from under him to run to the kitchen sink and vomit. There were three owls at the window congratulating the four of them on such a great gig but Jack found he remembered none of it, nor did he remember what drugs he had taken such that he remembered none of it. The last owl was from El and Lupin and contained a parcel full of hangover potions. The first he brought to Flora at the kitchen sink, and the second to Imani at the kitchen table (she had fallen asleep sitting at it, with her black velvet cloak as a pillow), and the third to Ras who had made it to the chartreuse settee and was curled up there draped in his white fur coat. It was altogether freezing cold in the house because assorted revelers had opened the windows against the heat of several score sweaty dancing bodies and then neglected to close them. 

They ordered a pizza from a Muggle shop down the road, and Ras made Bloody Marys and Imani rolled a joint, and in about an hour they had convened in the living room in a marginally improved state to discuss Moves From Here. Right off the bat Flora asked, “D’you think you can get us another show at Bad Magic, Jack?” 

“No,” he said. “No, no, no. Absolutely positively not.” 

He hadn’t told any of them about the deal he’d made for the first two shows. But he suspected Flora had noticed the gestures and faces the shop owner had made at him when they loaded in. 

“Fine,” said Flora. “Mani, what about your brother — ” 

“I talked to him last week. The place he bartends is only booking electronic stuff now. He said he could maybe put in a good word for us at some of the other spots but those are all pay to play.” 

“Well how much do we have to pay to play?” 

“I went by the Embassy and asked,” Jack said. “Maybe we could afford it if we stopped eating, drinking, all drugs, and you two moved in here with us, for three months.” 

“It’s disingenuous,” Ras said. For someone who had in not so many words threatened suicide and/or reenrollment in law school (perhaps tantamount) if the band bombed he was also deeply concerned with authenticity. “And the Embassy sucks.” 

“It does suck,” said Imani, “the sound blows, and it feels like a morgue.” 

“Fine,” Jack said, “so what are we gonna do?” 

A very loud silence. 

\--

They tried to approach it from a different angle. In January and February they recorded to the best of their ability on Jack and Ras’s doctored tape player a shitty live demo of _With the Hobgoblins_ , which Jack copied and sent blindly to wizarding record labels with a note (Imani wrote it, because her handwriting was the neatest) telling the story of the band only somewhat embellished, and offering to come in and perform a showcase if To Whom It May Concern might be interested. Twenty copies of the tapes were made; ten were sent to record labels and the other ten given out to friends. In three years’ time the original tapes would be worth at least sixty galleons. At the time however there was no response. 

Jack dug out his camera equipment again and took a series of very bleak photographs of the rest of the band walking around the neighborhood in their black cloaks. In the backyard of the Fortis Green house smoking cigarettes looking thin and pale. For most meals they were eating rice and beans washed down with the worst conceivable Muggle whiskey. Most days Ras did not leave his room, and he had started locking the door. Only twice did Jack Floo Whyland in a panic however both times the trouble turned out to be that Ras had taken a Sugarman’s and passed out. 

The images he compiled into a zine called _Down and Out with the Hobgoblins_ which was packaged with the initial pressing of _With the Hobgoblins_ and sold separately as part of a special promotion at about fifty participating wizarding record shops around the world. The most reproduced photograph in it is of Imani and Flora in the upstairs bathroom at the Fortis Green house after a six-hour (doomed) recording session in the basement, standing together over the sink carefully cleaning the split-open bloody blisters on Imani’s hands. Imani’s forehead is on Flora’s shoulder and most of her weight leaned against her, and they are both barefoot. Jack’s camera is just visible between them in the mirror. 

After Jack took it he went to his bedroom and dry-heaved three times out the window. Then he lay in the bed thinking perhaps he should weep or something but couldn’t. He felt suffocating under the weight of some feeling and after a little while he realized he wasn’t certain what the feeling was about, or what it was called. 

\--

In early March Jack was downstairs in the drawing room making posters with ink and blown-up photographs when the owner of Bad Magic Records’ head appeared in the Floo and he jumped six feet in the air. 

“Childermass,” said the shop owner. 

“Come to collect?” 

“Ha ha bloody ha.” The owner’s lips, already thin, pursed still tighter. “I fucking wish. I had a support act bail for tonight. And I wondered if your gang of merry miscreants might be available.” 

Ras was supposed to have dinner with Whyland that night, and Imani and Flora were at their place in Camden. But Jack said “Yes, yes, of course yes, what time?” 

“I’m titillated as always by your eagerness to please. Be here at eight — I’ll expect you onstage at 9:30.” 

When he was gone from the fireplace Jack cast in a handful of Floo powder and summoned up Imani and Flora’s place. Their Floo was in their bedroom so he closed his eyes before he shouted their names. 

“We’re decent,” Flora said. She and Imani were sitting on the floor in bathrobes playing wizard chess. Even from the fireplace Jack could smell weed and patchouli. 

“We have a gig tonight at Bad Magic.” 

“Did you finally fuck that guy or what.” 

Jack laughed, swallowing ash. “The trick is to get them on the hook with the offer of sex and then never deliver. He said an opening band dropped out.” 

“We should start calling ourselves the Replacements.” 

“It’s genius but you know it’s taken. See you there at eight?” 

The girls agreed, and Jack pulled himself from the Floo and ran upstairs to pound on Ras’s door with both fists until he opened it. 

\--

At 8pm they loaded in, which as per usual was a montage of levitating and bustling un-communication and the owner brazenly staring at Jack’s ass, and at 9:30pm they took the stage to a crowd of surprising familiarity and friendliness. Jack and Ras had managed to get ahold that afternoon of the MGC radio station who had put out a last-minute call to action, and Whyland it seemed had summoned half her law school to the occasion. 

Still something about this felt apocalyptic. It was going to have to be very good or they had exhausted every option. Certainly after every allowance they would not be allowed on this stage again unless Jack put out which he did not think he really cared to. They had heard back from none of the record labels, and the zines Jack brought around to the shops were suffering diminishing returns. Either it works, or death, he heard Ras say, months ago, or it works, and death. 

In the back of the house he heard the owner of the shop fade out the music on the PA. Ras struck a very dark chord not unlike the first of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The kids in the front shoved up tidal against each other toward the makeshift stage and though he could see the eerie masklike mouths stretched pink and wide with cheering he could hardly hear it over the sound of the feedback in the monitor. Already the still stuffy air felt like a sauna at a mountain resort circa 1965. And electric and brutal as ever Ras’s eyes met his. Jack took a step forward toward him and Ras clasped his elbow (clammy palm) and whispered in his ear — “All or nothing,” he said, “innit?” 

Flora had started playing the bass riff that opened “Felix Felicis.” Jack looked desperately to Imani and when her drums kicked in they did at about double the usual speed. After that he didn’t remember much. 

\--

The show was reviewed by Morrigan Sands, the marimba player, for a quarterly zine she published out of her dorm room and circulated throughout the MGC campus, as follows. From it would be drawn the title of the Hobgoblins’ second LP, _Erebus and Terror_ , and the title of the b-side of the “When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog” 7” single, “Oh God the Girls.” 

_At the meridian of Hobgoblins’ set at Bad Magic Records 6 March 1985 I turn to my friend beside me who has been tripping on mushrooms since just past teatime; “What do you see?” I am not certain they can hear me over the Sound — manifest, magnificent, swarming, like a body of water in a spring flood — but they press their sweaty mouth against my ear. “Sonic Monoliths.”_

_Altogether come to think of it they did not sound like very much at all but Sound. Noise and sometimes no Noise at all but a gaping (yonic?) vacancy of should-be-sound spiritus mundi’d before our brainwaves. Our Jack from Arithmancy is a kind of Rimbaudian descendent angel half naked with bad inkstain tattoos and a dragon fang necklace scraping his pawnshop guitar wandering gleefully through the hell panel of a Bosch triptych a doomed explorer with the Erebus and Terror… And none of us ever suspected we would be allowed much time on Earth at all in the same room with Rastaban Boardman: deposed scion of Corbenic and the Waste Land (Bowie, Jagger, Eno circa glam, Iggy Pop in pajama pants, suicide in his eye) recently busted from 5150 in a moth-eaten fur coat, joint hanging from [cue “Lips Like Sugar”…] Meanwhile the Girls. Oh God the Girls. I feel as though I have swum across the sea and prostrate myself upon the quad of Smith College the Pure Gold Baby that Melts to a Shriek —_

_These four creatures are a sort of aural Stonehenge. I don’t know where this music comes from but certainly it is not from our collective now. If I were a different sort of witch I would expostulate perhaps they were all possessed by the sort of demons who got into the preachers’ girls in Salem. Itching stretching scratching screaming. This is menhiric atavism. Baptism by ash. My stomach’s turning inside out. I attempt photographs but they do not stand still unless they sing together and when they sing together I do not dare to lift the camera to my face lest I interrupt some very dangerous spellwork._

_The crowd sucks the mic in three songs deep like a maelstrom and Jack (utterly fearless, I have decided; more Crozier than Franklin) goes after it and drags Rastaban along with him. So Rastaban tackles him to the floor. They play half the song on top of each other and several felled audience members amidst an ecstasy of sweat and tracked-in snow and spilled hallucinogenic potions hardly making any sort of sound at all but for the crowd screaming in which of course is the everysound. Ursound. Whenever they look at each other which they do with a disarming frankness and curdling regularity it is a sort of Unbreakable Vow._

_Dear Reader, I went outside afterward and shattered in the cold; I went home and I wept._

_Rated: Seven out of Seven Joys of the Virgin_

\--

They were outside in the frigid night cold and Ras was kissing his face all over when he came back to. Lips (like smoke) in the soft sweat-sticky shadow under his eyes. Something had draped over his back; this was Imani. The pads of her hands over his chest were burning hot and left bloody prints. Flora had her arms around them all barely approximating half circumference and Jack heard for the first time someone was laughing hysterically and the someone was himself. 

“Who’s playing after us?” Flora asked. 

“Suckers,” said Ras gleefully. “I almost feel bad.” 

He remembered, vividly, shoving into the crowd, and they swallowed him up; he had Ras’s wrist in his hand, and he could feel Ras’s heartbeat, and Ras shoved him in it deeper, until it drowned them both. It was a pleasure to go under. Like a warm bath, and in it was darkness. Better than any drugs. Better than sex. 

“Mani, you ought to always play ‘Felix’ like that,” Flora said. 

“That’s what I’ve been fucking saying! I can play ‘Ragged Claws’ faster too if you all dare.” 

“We can try it for the next one,” Jack told them. 

“Next one, eh?” 

“Can’t you feel it?” Perhaps it was the side effects of the cocaine (“…I’m thinking that it must be love,” Bowie sang in his head) but there was a fine gold thread in it — in all his veins and in his mind… Though he’d been hopeless enough at astronomy he’d always had a mind for divination. “I can feel, like, a next one.” 

His smile felt like it would split off his face and fly away. Ras, beaming, kissed him in the corner of it. 

They were outside for another ten minutes or so (sharing a limp joint they had to dry out with magic before it would light) before the cold got to all of them and they started back inside to watch the next band. But on the way in, at the makeshift bar the shop owner had set up in a back corner, they were waylaid by an unfamiliar man, tall and cold in the eyes, with slicked-back blonde hair, a mysteriously pristine red suit, and a bolo tie. He looked like a drug smuggler from a revisionist Western. Over the PA the shop owner was playing Joy Division’s “Disorder.” On stage the next band was setting up their equipment and Jack felt a low throb of guilt to see that the shop had cleared out by at least half. 

The man in the red suit magicked five crystal shotglasses out of thin air and filled them with the bartender’s finest whiskey. Then he floated each of them over to Jack, Ras, Imani, and Flora, and took the fifth for himself. 

“Here’s to a gig well played,” he said, holding his aloft. “Do you four have some sort of band toast, or…” 

“Just Bottoms Up usually,” said Flora. 

“Or Here Goes Nothing,” said Jack. 

“Alright, well, here goes nothing,” said the man in the red suit. They all clinked glasses and took the shots. Then the man in the red suit said, “I’m the booker and promoter at a rock club in Knockturn Alley. Perhaps you’ve heard of it — it’s called Poveglia.” 

The most influential Knockturn Alley rock club at the time was called Dyatlov & Roswell. Poveglia would make a name for itself over the next few years thanks to the ingenuity and prescience of the man in the red suit and by the time of the Second War with Voldemort it was widely respected as a breeding ground for wizarding rock’s Next Big Thing, particularly after Dyatlov & Roswell was shuttered following death threats to its Muggle-born co-owner. At the time, though, none of the Hobgoblins had so much as heard of the place. 

“We’ve only been having rock shows for a couple months now,” the man in the red suit explained. “The founder just passed and he was devoted to chamber music and the like. I tried to explain to him no one wants to hear a string quartet in a basement bar in Knockturn Alley in 1984. But I am certain by that point he had gone almost entirely deaf. Anyway the point remains that now I am booking rock acts in that space, 300 capacity, and you would get 20 or 30% from the door depending on support, drinks on the house for you four and your entourage…” 

Flora laughed nervously at _entourage_. 

“We could start with a three month residency. Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, hour-long set, hour and a half, whatever you can give me, if the audience is feeling it. Your task is basically to keep them in the bar and drinking; that’s how we make our cut. There will be some Fridays you might have to play the support act. But based on tonight’s gig that shouldn’t be a problem…” 

“Can we sell tapes and merch and all that?” 

“Certainly; we’ve set up a table for previous acts. You’ll have to provide your own salesperson.” Nervously he adjusted his bolo tie. There was quite a lot at stake for him, too, Jack realized. “We’re new to this business and I understand any trepidation. But just the other day Evvy from Dyatlov was over to see Crushing Valerian.” 

“C.V. played at your club?” 

“Certainly, certainly they did, weeklong residency in fact.” 

Crushing Valerian was a mysterious and vaguely occultist noise act out of Holyhead which Jack and Ras were obsessed with. 

“You kids have got something going which is very special, real crossover appeal, you might say; I would bet Amortentia’ll be knocking down your door within a year, not to mention the W.R.W. You’ve got style and you’ve got songs and you’ve the kind of look that sells. Weird Sisters’ tenure at the top of the wizarding charts is simply conditional on their having no real competitors, because they fucking suck and they’re old, mean, and hideous.” 

Ras threw his head back and cackled. 

The man in the red suit was smiling now he knew he had them on his side. “Come play at my club and get out from under the lecherous perv who owns this place,” he said. 

\--

Hobgoblins played the residency at Poviglia Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights through March, April, May and into early June 1985. In doing so they opened for just about every wizarding rock act of any repute who would take the man in the red suit up on his offer, which included Crushing Valerian, Norwegian Ridgebacks, Goody Good and the Goodmans, Arithmantics, Sweeney Fenimore, and Ectoplasmic Annihilation. Hobgoblins’ headlining sets on Thursdays and Saturdays, at first lesser-attended, slowly started to draw larger audiences, spurred along by Jack’s rabid flyering (he’d taken the list of public wizarding bulletin boards from El, and had developed a handy spell that made his flyers visible only to folks carrying a wand, which meant he could hang them up on Muggle corkboards too), and by college radio and word-of-mouth. All the magical colleges in London had started playing the by-then-ancient _In the Garden_ cassette, which they sold at Poviglia with Whyland or Imani’s brother Olu manning the merch table, and several shows on MGC saw increased call-ins from listeners demanding to hear tracks from the shitty live demo of _With the Hobgoblins._ They were swiftly written up in more zines besides Morrigan’s, and a photograph of Jack and Flora, leaning back-to-back during the bridge of “Highgate Cemetery” was featured in the Tuesday _Prophet_ in an article about the burgeoning scene at Poviglia. Ras was jealous, but he pretended not to be. 

They slept not much and poorly. Jack turned twenty. They had resigned themselves not to be the sort of new live band who looks as though they are still learning how to perform live, and not to be the sort of performers who mimic the recorded cuts note-for-note. As such they spent much of the time they were not at Poviglia rehearsing, which meant they were obliged to truck all their equipment back and forth to Fortis Green every Saturday night as they could not afford to buy more guitars or another drum kit. The money from the merch and the door was split four ways and at first entirely spent covering assorted debts. Then a portion of it was saved, by mutual agreement, in an antique vase in an upstairs cupboard at the Fortis Green house, to cover the eventual costs of recording in a studio. 

They did not have as much time to write as they once had. They could either sleep or they could write. Neither Jack nor Ras liked it but there was also no time to speak about it. Sometimes the best they could do was write in soundchecks or at the end of their Thursday night sets where they became rapidly infamous for jamming out “Sympathy for Brian Wilson” for over twenty minutes. 

Jack took photographs — Imani and Flora loading in. Ras onstage soundchecking in the white fur coat and his Crushing Valerian tee which was already torn at the neck so often did he wear it. Cigarette in his mouth unlit. Photographs of the four of them in the mirror in the cavernous green room doing their makeup. Imani and Flora holding hands on the vacant grey-black street in the very early morning; they had not yet gone to sleep. Jack and Ras on the stoop of the Fortis Green house, through the tunnelish overgrown bower stretching from the sidewalk; they had been talking about the Cult’s “She Sells Sanctuary,” which was at that time brand new and inescapable on Muggle radio, and someone had given them a copy of the 7” with the long version on it, and they had been listening to a lot of Spacemen 3. “I want to make a psychedelic like desert-driving record that feels like magic more than drugs,” Ras had been saying, and Jack had been laughing. Indeed _Erebus and Terror_ would eventually be that record. In the photograph, which they would consider briefly for the back cover of that LP (it seemed altogether too intimate) they were looking at and through each other intently as though there were some secret or a strand of memory they were sharing, and Jack’s elbow was folded out against Ras’s knees. It was spring and still and the cigarette smoke caught in an unfurling spiral. 

It was not as though they were in real trouble yet but there was this thing that gnawed at Jack’s brain and kept him awake. He told himself it was because he wasn’t writing. Writing was the actual act of exorcism. Playing the songs over and over and over again meanwhile was just wallowing — living again and again the fragile kindling spark of feeling he’d written them to purge from himself. 

\--

In their gigs at Poviglia they resolved to split the sets with one part Jack’s songs, one part Ras’s songs, one part Imani and Flora’s songs, and one part covers. This became rapidly difficult because they often weren’t sure how to divide up which song was Jack’s and which song was Ras’s, as they had written and recorded and indeed sang most of them together, and songs that had started out Imani and Flora’s had later been completely co-opted by Jack and Ras, and most of the covers sounded best when tacked onto the end of one of their original tracks. 

They also had two mics, which presented heretofore undiscussed confusion. El came one night pretty early on and told Jack privately she thought the sound guy believed Ras to be the frontman and as such mixed his mic higher. Later he would not be above these sorts of things but going to talk to the sound engineer about it seemed like an act of true Rock Frontman Ego and so instead Jack would cross the stage to Ras’s mic and sing with him, particularly if there was a complicated bit they had to harmonize together. “Do you really have to do that,” Ras asked, just once. Jack said, yes I do, and so they didn’t talk about it anymore. Eventually it was just how it was. Noses in each other’s eyes. Ras’s hair once briefly caught on fire from the end of Jack’s cigarette. 

In the beginning of June Evvy Mitchell, the booker from Dyatlov & Roswell, stopped Jack and Ras outside Poviglia and coaxed them like a witch out of Grimm into a back alley so they could all three do bumps of very pure coke off her keys. She was wearing an oversize Skinny Puppy shirt and Doc Martens and ripped-up black pantyhose. They had seen her several times in the last month at Poviglia for their gigs and had expected this was coming but had not yet dared to even vocalize it because it seemed so improbable. She told them she could give them Friday and Saturday nights until October and they would headline. Their cut was to be 40% of the door. The paperwork had already been drawn up and all it needed was their signatures. The first gig would be one week from that night: June 16, 1985. 

\--

Hence the London reign of the Hobgoblins split the surface from a kind of subterranean ripple into a growing rushing wave picking things up and carrying them along. It was not quite yet the raging tsunami it would be upon the release of _Erebus and Terror_. Nor was it the gaping tearing can’t-look-away car-wreck maelstrom it would be before, during, and after the writing, recording, releasing, and touring of their third and final record, _Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins_. As yet in the mix were no drugs that could actually kill you unless you were really trying, and Jack and Ras had not yet punched each other on stage, though that would begin not long into the D &R residency. Now that their gigs were only two nights a week they found they had more time to write songs and as such things felt smooth and sane and almost normal Sunday through Thursday. 

In October they were interviewed by Elizabeth Grey of Wizarding Rock Weekly in a short sidebar feature which included a rather drunk photo of Jack and Ras standing together under Ras’s white fur coat in the rain. Ras began introducing himself to journalists as Stubby, to everyone’s giggly amusement, but then it stuck. He said it was a childhood nickname, but Jack unwisely (drunkenly) told Elizabeth Grey next time they were interviewed that it referred to his penis. They turned down a record deal Ras’s lawyers said was shit. They had moderately professional photographs taken in one of the Dark antique stores on Knockturn Alley just before a gig at Dyatlov & Roswell, but had to flee the shop after Jack touched an unidentifiable skull which subsequently attacked him. It was the inspiration for a song he later wrote for _Erebus and Terror_ , “Mud Blood Blues” — 

_If you took me home to meet your family_

_I do expect they’d want to kill me_

In November they retired to the Fortis Green house to write and had made a down payment on studio time in January with the proceeds from their two residencies. Imani and Flora backpacked for two weeks in the Pennines and came back with songs. They were invited to play a Christmas show at Poviglia with Crushing Valerian, Arithmantics, and Weird Sisters, and they were standing outside in the snow, pointedly ignoring the Weird Sisters’ set (all four, especially Ras, still held a grudge from the disastrous Bad Magic show about a year previous), when a well-dressed witch stepped out the door. 

“Quality set,” she said. Time felt slowing down. Deja vu, though it was impossible. She shook the girls’ hands first. When she looked in Jack’s eyes hers were bright and cutting yellow-green like a carrion bird’s. He knew what was coming before it came. “I’m Mitzi Love,” she said, “A&R, Amortentia Records.” 


	4. Chapter 4

IV. 

The following review of _With the Hobgoblins_ appeared in the March 21, 1986, issue of Wizarding Rock Weekly (hereafter referred to as W.R.W.), alongside a ten-page spread of the band constituting a lengthy interview, about twenty photographs including images from Jack’s zines and personal collection, and a pullout poster of Ras and Jack (Imani and Flora relegated to the shadows) in the mirror in the green room at Dyatlov  & Roswell, complete with the boys’ printed signatures in glow-in-the-dark ink and black lipstick prints from the girls: 

_When was the last time a wizarding rock band made a debut this fresh, fun, and freaky? Certainly not since the mid-‘70s reign of the Occlumen has a rock act fresh from wizarding London’s seediest clubs presented such crossover appeal to mainstream magic wireless. Yet, even before the release of their debut record, the unlikely foursome’s debut single “When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog” has become inescapable. So the only question is: does the full record live up to the standard?_

_The short answer is: yes. The long answer is: bloody hell, yes. “Dog,” angry and catchy and much-interpreted already by fans, might be the band’s mission statement of sorts, the chucking in the ring of their collective hat, but it’s far from the best material on_ With the Hobgoblins _. That would be “Sympathy for Brian Wilson,” the record’s eight-minute closer and clearly a sign of things to come (see our feature interview with the band, pages 12-22), or perhaps “End of the River” — with its instrumentals penned by rhythm duo Imani Rose and Flora St. James and the guitar lines and lyrics topped off by frontmen Stubby Boardman and Jack Childermass, it captures the band’s ethos of collaboration. Not to mention it rips: the band are known to close it out live with a rapid-fire hardcore cover of the Smiths’ “Panic.”_

_Hay’s been made in these pages among others that part of the band’s appeal is that they seem like the sort of kids (none of them are yet 23, with St. James the oldest at “twenty two and three quarters”) you might run into smoking cigarettes in the park, or snorting coke in an alley, or making out at the movies, or throwing raucous parties at the house immortalized in “Western Road Empire;” in person they’re playful and clever and cheeky, and so, in many ways, is the music. The flip side of the coin is that their evocation of these scenes feels effortless, even as you know it’s not. They’ve labored for this (Childermass nods to it, albeit typically cryptically, in his best song on the record, “Ritual Suicide,” in whose chorus his and Boardman’s intertwined voices list a parade of slow-acting poisons with increasing desperation, ending with “doubt, and fear, and love”), and now that fame and fortune are in their sights you can guarantee they won’t be going anywhere anytime soon._

The photograph that ran next to the review had been shot on the stoop of the W.R.W. offices; Jack and Ras were sitting, Jack’s elbow was around Ras’s knee, and Ras’s arm was draped around him. Flora’s hand was pressed against Ras’s forehead, and Imani’s hands were at Jack’s shoulders. The stylist had dressed the girls in vivid ‘70s florals and massive sunglasses despite the clouds, and the boys in layers of wizarding thrift shop ridiculousness the likes of which they could still not, at that point, themselves afford. Jack had condescended to a vintage Ministry janitor’s jumpsuit (though a reference to this would also later wind up in “Mud Blood Blues”) but he had kept his leather jacket on and his boots and dragon fang necklace. Ras had been dressed in something with fringe; he looked like one of Waugh’s dissolute gentlemen of property had up and joined a bike gang. 

_With the Hobgoblins_ was released on March 23, 1986, and within two weeks had reached #2 on the wizarding charts. _Erebus and Terror_ and _Decline and Fall_ would both dislodge Celestina Warbeck’s latest release from the top of said charts, but their first record never managed it (in particular because Warbeck had just released, in February 1986, what many considered the best LP of her career, the Kate Bush-ian _Once, If My Memory Serves Me Well_ , inspired by her very public breakup with the renowned wizard sculptor Malcolm Sinclair). _With the Hobgoblins_ remained on the charts until July of that year and went silver by the end of 1987. By this time select numbers had even infiltrated Muggle college radio, introduced by squibs and clever bargain bin hunters. 

They bought a van, used, and toured the UK and Ireland, and after not so very long they were invited to tour Europe. They were obliged to hire a tour manager and didn’t get on with any of the folks the label recommended, so they tapped El Rice. She had finished her degree at MGC, and Lupin had long since disappeared (later they learned he had taken a research grant in rural Newfoundland), but luckily El didn’t know enough about the story to blame Jack for it and as such she gladly came along. She plotted their tours with hourly itineraries and made arrangements for the full moon nights when she’d be obliged to miss their shows and then sleep all the day following across the back seats of their van. She would serve as their tour manager until leaving to continue her degree at St. Andrews’ in early 1988, just after the release of _Erebus and Terror_. With her guidance the Hobgoblins wrote it into their contract that they would not open for, nor invite to open for them, any bands whose every member was a white man. This was a subtle dig at the Weird Sisters, who had been quoted in W.R.W. making subtle digs of their own, but the provision lasted to the end of their career, and extended to all three solo- and side-projects stemming from the Hobgoblins proper. 

They toured Europe twice and then America, where the crowds were smaller but no less raucous. Gigs on the first Hobgoblins US tour were name-dropped as game-changers in the eventual memoir of every American wizarding punk from Felicia Fractious of Dismal Youth to Iggy Evanston of Spell Damage. They played in the great hall at Ilvermorny for all of fifteen minutes before the plug was pulled on them due to all of the cuss words and drug references, and as such, three hours later after being plied with contraband, Jack and Ras played a full acoustic set in a student dormitory and answered a few of the kids’ wide-eyed questions. “Is it true you were kicked out of Hogwarts,” one of the students asked Jack, with an expression of muted, jealous wonder. 

“Yes but I appealed it and was reenrolled.” 

“For drugs?” 

This was what people seemed to frequently assume. Sometimes Jack wondered why. “No,” he said. “Even more salacious if you can believe it.” 

Whispers abounded. Jack snuck a look at Ras in the corner of his eye to find Ras was already watching him with an amused, wry look, the crooked smile that always seemed to connote he was ready to tell a good story. 

“Have you two ever,” said a small pale girl. Heads whipped around to face her with surprise and her voice plummeted in volume and confidence. “Have you, well, have you ever _snogged_?” 

She said what she likely believed to be the appropriately British slang term with a kind of magical weight. The students laughed amongst each other and the girl’s pale face had gone vivid red and when Jack snuck a look in the corner of his eye again Ras had become very interested in putting out his cigarette. 

“We kiss each other all the time,” said Jack, feeling almost vengeful. “Never with tongue,” he added, at Ras’s look, though this was he supposed a lie. He thought perhaps he should go on. Instead he said, “Does anyone want to hear another song?” 

They drove West and played the rec rooms at schools of magic, and basement clubs in seedy wizarding districts, and house shows at magical graduate colleges, and gigs on the American wizarding wireless. In between shows they went to famous American landmarks and wandered through the cities. El took photographs that wound up in her 1987 chapbook, and Jack took more, several of which would eventually be packaged in the deluxe edition vinyl of _Erebus and Terror_. The album’s cover was taken in Nebraska just after dawn when Ras had pulled over the van to let Imani and Flora out to pee. Like scarecrows in black they wandered together into a field of yellow-green wheat until the thick fog nearly blurred them out. 

They rehearsed covers in the van and wrote new songs on their days off in bad Muggle motel rooms; on that tour they could only ever afford one to be shared between the five of them. Material from these sessions (always with the low drone of the TV on in the background, or the shower running) sourced much of _Erebus and Terror_ , two songs from _Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins_ , and several tracks that would be saved several years for Jack and Ras’s respective solo albums. In Nevada (two days out of Vegas on their way to Seattle) they were pulled over by the Muggle police and the van was searched up-and-down for drugs. Luckily, Jack had presciently stowed all the drugs in the glove compartment behind three different Disillusionment charms. 

In Seattle they had three days off and had been invited to stay in the Madison Beach duplex of some old friends of Flora’s family. Imani and Flora and El went off together to the North Cascades for an overnight backpacking trip and Jack and Ras explored the city by bus and on foot. The wizarding district was ensconced in the sketchiest neighborhood and they searched the record stores and blew their per diem on tapes by local bands. They sat together on a dock on Lake Washington with their guitars and a bottle of wine and fleshed out the rest of “Mud Blood Blues.” 

_If you took me home to meet your family  
_ _I do expect they’d want to kill me;  
_ _But when there’s another war, baby  
_ _I need to count on you to save me_

In America they had different sorts of issues with wizarding bloodedness which often corroborated catastrophically with their simmering race issues. Plenty of black American wizards were pure-blooded but these assertions were frequently challenged via public slander and libel. Meanwhile, mixed-blood white families claimed illustrious (false) lineages so as to position themselves deserving of more clout and respect than their similarly-blooded black neighbors. Just as education and employment and social welfare were meant to be race-blind so were they meant to be blood-blind, but of course even by this juncture they were not. Jack was frequently reminded that the American Magical Congress had not adopted the Muggle Congress’s amendments to their constitution which had freed the slaves and made them citizens until a good fifty years after the fact. 

He was beginning to become very nervous that when there was another war, which was, he had long understood, inevitable, he would have made himself rather a target and indeed a prize pig: a half-black Mudblood of public face whose queerness was easily discernible with but a quick read through his Hogwarts records. He wondered if, when there was another war, anyone who had bought the band’s record or collected their W.R.W. covers or hung up pictures of Jack and Ras on their bedroom walls would do anything to protect or defend or support him (and Flora as well for that matter, as her mother was Muggle-born, and Imani too, whose blackness likely superseded her pure-bloodedness in Dark wizards’ eyes). Chiefly he wondered if Ras would do anything. The Boardman dynasty of the Wizengamot were notorious appeasers who had never publicly aligned against Voldemort (and indeed would not, until Whyland, who would be assassinated for her trouble). 

Another thing, he figured, he couldn’t talk to Ras about. Ras had dreamed they walked into the sun together and recently he had told an American wizarding music paper that he considered his and Jack’s souls to have been formed together as twins in the primordial murk (he had recently eaten mushrooms they had been given by a noise collective in Phoenix, Arizona) but who knew what he would do when reality came down to brass tacks? He was a notorious avoider of the real world; it was why the band existed. And about the first war (the inexorable setting of all Jack’s bad trips and nightmares, neither of which which were infrequent when they toured) they had only ever talked abstractly. 

“It sounds too much like ‘Misty Mountain Hop,’” Ras said. 

“Well maybe if you wanted to listen to anything else but Led Zeppelin IV while you’re driving…” 

“Try it like — one more step. Zeppelin took it from the old delta bluesmen and now we need to take it from them.” 

Jack tried it again with more of a punk feel and tempo. In the stillness and the fog across the lake his voice and the sound of the guitars were a sort of twined-up muted echo. Later in that decade several American Muggles would take the weight of this landscape and distill it into music, thus launching a punk movement which would define in many ways the sound of the early nineties, even in the wizarding rock world which until the Hobgoblins was largely insular and Eurocentric. By the time they were recording _Decline and Fall_ in the summer of 1990 all four of the Hobgoblins were listening primarily to _Bleach_ (and as such the record isn’t uninfluenced) but in those days Cobain was just a student in Aberdeen on the distant wild coast. Ink has been spilled over the fact that he may have been a Muggle-born wizard who never received an invitation to attend Katherine Denny School (Seattle’s public academy of magic) due to a clerical error. It was rumored that he was a fan of the Hobgoblins and may have even attended later gigs they played in the American Northwest but this was never concretely substantiated. 

The song, “Mud Blood Blues,” has a feel to it Jack and Ras later thought prescient. But it was just that they had written it in Seattle and as such it had gone the only way it could go — very dark, and very cold. And very heavy. The chorus was a little fun (think Nirvana’s “In Bloom”) but it was also cutting. It was the first song (though very, very far from the last) Jack had really ever written to wound somebody with guilt. And of course that somebody was Ras, who was sitting with him on the dock on Lake Washington writing it; either he was completely oblivious, or they had crossed some threshold and he simply didn’t care. 

_They wouldn’t go for my mud blood clothes  
_ _My mud blood hair and my mud blood nose  
_ _My mud blood grades from mud blood school  
_ _I know you think it’s all quite cool  
_ _But I’ve got everything to lose  
_ _Lying in bed with the mud blood blues_. 

“Perhaps this record should be like a psychedelic and political punk blues record,” said Ras, in all contemplative and self-reflective seriousness. 

“Oh my God. Like _Wish You Were Here_?” 

Ras laughed. He had chipped his front left tooth in Omaha when the seething crowd had knocked the mic stand back in his face. He had seemed mystified by all the blood from his split-open lip which in the brilliant stage lights had seemed like a kind of fluorescent alien ichor. It had spattered all over the clothes he was wearing at the time (a pale yellow turtleneck and painters’ overalls from a shop in Boston) but he continued to wear them on stage despite looking in them like an escaped mental patient who had recently committed murder. El was a dab hand with cosmetic magic and had offered to fix the chipped tooth after the set but Ras had declined. It looked rather dashing and with his lazy eye created the sort of aesthetic effect he desired. In photoshoots from this point onward he was always drawing attention to it with his tongue, or thumb, or both. “I was thinking like _The Queen is Dead_ plus _For the Fucked Up Children of this World_ et cetera.” 

He could almost hear it stirring at the back of his mind. Sometimes it was like there was a tape player in there accessible to himself and Ras only through some complex and mystical leglimency. The songs played in there, finished, before they happened. Oftentimes it was just a matter of coaxing them out. 

\--

They finished touring the record in August 1987 with a show at the house in Fortis Green which rapidly became legendary. They played “Mud Blood Blues” live for the first time, and the house was nearly set on fire by a handful of MGC students attempting a seance in Jack’s darkroom. They were served with a Muggle police summons which the Boardman lawyers quickly took care of. W.R.W. sent Liz Grey again and the following interview was published a week later alongside a glossy photo spread of Jack and Ras looking very sweatily into each other’s eyes at their single mic. There was a sort of sad brushfire behind Jack’s eyes (he was on ecstasy and they had been struggling to write all day) and Ras looked as though he were on a psychedelic trip, which in fact was true (he later claimed Jack had appeared to him as a kind of wandering lost soul dragging a lantern through the darkness). 

_WRW: How does it feel to be back in Merrie Olde Englande?_

_JACK (drily): Merry as all fuck, innit._

_STUBBY: I’d never before been forced to self-identify as an Englishman and I must admit it uncomfortable. To be faced inexorably with the mire of our colonial legacy abroad and to be contemporaneously upheld in — in Spiritus Mundi, I suppose, as a sort of symbol of class and good breeding. It’s altogether complicated impossibly by magic but as of yet — well I don’t think my thesis on the subject presently arguable._

_JACK: What he’s trying to say is it’s a mindfuck._

_STUBBY: A good, sweaty, back-breaking mindfuck honestly. Like afterwards one finds oneself craving menthols and another go-‘round._

_WRW: So are you thinking about LP2?_

_JACK: Begging your pardon, we’ve been thinking about LP2 since 1984. The first record’d been finished years when it came out._

_STUBBY: What we’ve written for you now is the present and the future in coital embrace._

_JACK: Now you’ve got him on this cosmic sex talk he won’t come off it._

_STUBBY: The record’s called_ Erebus and Terror _after John Franklin’s lost ships. It’s about failure._

_WRW: Why a record about failure after the screaming success of the first?_

_JACK: Everything’s quite relative. Both of us will claim we foresaw the success of this band but neither of us are much for divination and the truth is it was rather a string of failures and some bloody good luck._

_STUBBY: Besides not all the failures we sing about on the record are personal._

_JACK: We subscribe to that old Women’s Lib slogan that the private is political._

_WRW: So can we expect you to get political?_

_STUBBY: I rather discourage anyone’s expecting anything from us and you should just open your mind to be surprised._

\--

They met with their team at Amortentia who doled out their advances and explained they were expecting the next record for February 1988 release. Imani and Flora promptly flew to New Zealand to go backpacking leaving Jack and Ras to write at the Fortis Green house. By the end of summer 1987 two thirds of _Erebus and Terror_ was written. The record’s themes spanned from blood purist bigotry (“Mud Blood Blues”) to reports of burgeoning Dark magic “interest groups” (“The Second War”) to race issues in the wizarding community (“Black Magic,” centering around a blues riff Ras had written after staying up all night doing coke and listening to R.L. Burnside, with lyrics by Jack and Imani, and the first time either of the girls’ voices appears on a Hobgoblins record) to recent concerns, plastered across the front page of just about every Sunday _Prophet_ , about growing “ambivalence, apathy, and drug use” amongst young witches and wizards. 

Jack had become fond of cutting out the most dire of these prognostications and hanging them up around the house. In a zine he made in Autumn 1987 which was never published for obvious reasons quotes from the _Prophet_ are figured alongside images of himself and Ras rolling joints and cutting lines of coke and filtering through baggies of pills and mushrooms, provided as ever by another dissolute fallen scion of pureblood nobility, Davis Rorschach, who had gone to school with Ras in Massachusetts but had similarly dropped out of law school (his had been in the magical graduate college at Yale) to pursue the infinite. He was also the person with whom Jack most regretted having slept, and in the Autumn of 1987 while he and Ras labored to finish _Erebus and Terror_ it seemed Rorschach invited himself over daily with assorted chemical distractions. Fans speculated he was the subject of “Inkblot Test,” track three on Jack’s 1995 solo record. 

They were sitting the three of them in the living room listening to Howlin’ Wolf. Rorschach smoked unfiltered cigarettes. It seemed to Jack that in another era he would be the sort of landed gentleman on whose property the local tenant boys would find skeletons whilst poaching quail. It was past midnight and there were candles lit all about because Ras was on acid and couldn’t stand fluorescent light. Jack didn’t like getting too fucked up around Rorschach because he didn’t trust him, so he had stuck to weed and beers. He had been trying to suss out Rorschach’s motivation whilst he and Ras discussed the goings on among their school’s alumni. His ingratiation back into Ras’s life after the Hobgoblins’ success might make more obvious sense if he was poor. But he wasn’t. The only purpose that Jack could glean was sadism and/or a thirst for fame which was itself sadistic in nature. He wondered how much Rorschach knew about Ras’s moods. And he wondered, not for the first time, how much Ras knew about himself and Rorschach. Their singular sexual liaison had occurred at one of the Fortis Green house parties in 1985 and Jack didn’t quite remember how it had started but he certainly remembered how it had ended, which was that he had kicked Rorschach out of his room and thrown his clothes after him and slammed the door. 

“Did you hear about what’s happening in Longnor,” said Rorschach. His eyes, which were a silver-green, stuck in Jack’s. 

“Where the fuck is Longnor,” said Ras. He wasn’t quite present. He was somewhere pleasant and far away and if Rorschach hadn’t been there certainly Jack would be too and they would be sitting together on the floor writing music about it with their ankles touching. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Rorschach said. He was looking at Jack still. Ras was looking intently into one of the candles and with his lazy eye continually slipping toward the center he looked very like some kind of fortune teller in training. “You know there’s a herd of unicorns, the largest extant in the UK, they say, in the Peak District?” 

“We did take courses in magical creatures in public school,” said Jack coldly. 

Rorschach ignored him. “The MLE in Longnor have requested a special team from the Ministry. It seems there’s a growing trade in unicorn blood.” 

“There’s always been trade in unicorn blood,” Ras said, “since the Beast and Being Accords of 1578.” 

“For Dark purposes, yes; for necromancy or… functional necromancy. And for those more evil potions. This is different. This trade is recreational.” 

Ras laughed once, his cackle-ish disbelieving laugh. The record had ended, so Jack got up and put on Muddy Waters. “Who would sign on to eternal damnation just to get high,” said Ras, though he sounded uncertain about it. 

“You’d be surprised.” 

This moment felt fragile. Like very many potentialities in Jack’s life it was as though talking about it were tantamount to actualizing it. 

“Possession’s been criminalized since 1578 as our Rastaban well knows,” Rorschach went on. “A couple drops on your clothes could land you in Azkaban. Not to mention the curse.” 

“I thought the curse only applied to those who killed a unicorn for its blood.” 

“It’s broader than that,” Ras said. He had a gentle way of explaining things. In another sort of world he might’ve been a teacher. “It has to do with intent. Like, if the blood is given to you by a third party and you can’t consent, it doesn’t necessarily transfer…” 

“One shouldn’t necessarily bank on causalities,” said Rorschach lightly. “It has a mind of its own.” 

A sudden chill went up Jack’s back like a shadow of lightning. 

“It’s rather like heroin times a hundred thousand,” Rorschach said. “So they say.” 

“That’s rather not a selling point, Davy.” 

“I’m just saying I’m curious if it might be worth the alleged and unsubstantiated eternal damnation.” 

“The curse is well substantiated,” said Jack, crossing his arms. He wondered what Ras would do if he asked Rorschach to leave. 

“Apparently you can combat the symptoms of the curse by keeping up taking the blood. Rather a good cheat, see?” 

In the stillness in the room between the three of them Muddy Waters seemed very loud. Ras had started looking into the candle again with his brow very tightly furrowed in a way that sometimes worried Jack. “Maybe you’d better leave, Rorschach,” he said at last. 

He went upstairs to get his guitar and when he came back down Rorschach was gone. Ras didn’t say anything about it, because he was still staring into the candle. “He creeps me out,” Jack said. 

Ras looked at him, and his eyebrow cocked. Perhaps he was going to say something like, you’re the one who let the devil inside you, if only for about four seconds. Then he looked back toward the candle again. 

Jack rolled another joint and sat on the floor and wrote a song before dawn which he titled “The Hex.” Ras was drumming out an abstract rhythm against his thighs which at first Jack found very annoying until he started to play along with it instead of over it. 

Much of the critical talk about _Erebus and Terror_ several years on surrounded its multifold, almost prophetical prescience: in the ways in which the band were ahead of their time (via their interception and interpolation of ‘90s trends like grunge and garage pop), and the ways in which Jack and Ras had predicted from the very first songs they wrote many of the ways the whole behemoth would unfold. “In the Garden” was the glaring example but fans of the band’s deep cuts cited “The Hex” with equal regularity. It reflected the more conspiratorial fan belief that Jack was secretly a divination ace capable of prophesy. After all, there wasn’t much alternative explanation for the fact that upon first hearing about the very existence of the drug to which he would later be addicted for over three years, for whose possession he would be sentenced to the two-year stint in prison which ended the band, which would nearly kill him thrice (twice by overdose and once by withdrawal), which would be the subject and meditation of most of his artistic output from 1988 onward, which would be the substance with which he superseded and replaced in his life most of the things he cared about (Ras, the band, songwriting, photography; though it seemed a sort of chicken vs. egg debate whether he lost these things because he started taking unicorn blood or whether he started taking unicorn blood because he was losing them), he had written a song with the following bridge and chorus: 

_I’m begging you to lift the hex you cast on me  
_ _It’s easier to erase my mind than to cut you free  
_ _Most of these days I can’t get up off the floor  
_ _You don’t come around and see me anymore  
_ _Cursed by blood  
_ _Cursed by blood  
_ _Curse my blood  
_ _Curse my blood  
_ _It has a mind of its own…_

\--

Despite Rorschach’s continued interruptions (he did not mention unicorn blood after that night, but he did seem to collect disturbing stories to share with Jack and Ras whenever he came over), they had finished writing songs for _Erebus and Terror_ by the time Imani and Flora returned from New Zealand. In the end of October 1987 they went to Owlsblood Studios in Manchester to record the LP with Sam Ketterslee, who they’d tapped because he’d produced records for both Crushing Valerian and the Weird Sisters, the latter of whose studio sound the four Hobgoblins had always begrudgingly admitted was admirable. 

Thence came the trouble. 

They turned in a cassette tape of the record as it satisfied them to Mitzi Love at Amortentia on October 20, 1987. Subsequently, on October 22, the four of them were working out how to perform some of the more challenging bits of “The Hex” live in the basement at the Fortis Green house when they received an owl requesting an urgent meeting at the Amortentia offices. As such, the four of them, vaguely damp and ruffled and residually stoned in their rehearsal clothes, were obliged to face down the entire executive staff and board of directors of the record label in the windowless boardroom in which, two years previous, they had signed their contract. The cassette tape (in an empty case, blank but for the printing _DEMO PRESSING CONFIDENTIAL HOBGOBLINS EREBUS AND TERROR_ ) sat on the table like a bomb they would be asked to diffuse. 

“Simply put we can’t release this,” said Mitzi Love as soon as they had all sat down. “Not as it currently exists.” 

Ras perked up. He had put the lawyerly look on his face that Flora had dubbed Esquire. “Why not?” 

“There is a _slur_ in the title of the first track,” said one of the board members. 

“It’s not — I’m a, well, I’m Muggle-born,” said Jack. Across the table board members’ mouths twisted, or they looked away. “The song’s about me,” he continued. A flare of fear or something had gone up in his chest. Perhaps he shouldn’t’ve confessed it. “Did you even listen to it?” 

“We didn’t need to,” said another board member. 

“This is not a band from whom you will get one record every two years chock full of fun danceable jokey cuts for the Hogwarts Yule Ball,” said Ras. “This band will never record a song called ‘Do the Hippogriff.’ In short this band is not the Weird Sisters and I thought that was apparent to you when you signed us.” 

“That is — yes, that’s been very apparent.” 

“It’s too political,” said Mitzi Love. “It’s not just that song. The time isn't right for us to release this.” She looked at them with an expression that suggested she would say more if they weren’t in the presence of the board. “You know as well as I do. This is — a calm before a storm, as it were. We can’t afford to set up a lightning rod.” 

“We’ll take it to another label,” said Ras. 

“You can’t,” said one of the board members. “You signed a three-album contract. Not to mention we own exclusive rights to all your recordings — including this cassette.” He indicated it as though it would explode. 

“Take the first track off the record and tone down the second and the seventh,” said Mitzi Love, in the manner of a begrudging ultimatum. The second track was “The Second War” and the seventh was “Black Magic.” 

“Can’t we rewrite the first track too? We can call it ‘Muggle Born Blues.’” 

“We’re going to catch enough flak for all the drug references,” said one of the board members. “The first track is absolutely a no-go. Be thankful we’re not asking for an entirely new record.” 

They later learned the only reason they weren’t was because Amortentia had recently been forced to take a disastrous dive on a traditional wizarding folk band they’d signed called River Lethe, who had recorded an (actually quite good) concept record about the moral imperative to close Azkaban. The label was suffering financially and couldn’t afford much more studio time for the Hobgoblins. But neither could they afford to put out another record which failed because it was too politically radical. 

The four of them went back to the house and sat in the drawing room in silence for ten minutes or so until Ras said, “We have to do it.” 

This was what they were all thinking and part of Jack understood it but still it felt like something standing on his chest. It seemed altogether proof that all his fears were founded that Ras wouldn’t defend “Mud Blood Blues.” 

“If we don’t do it they’ll do it for us,” Ras went on. He had pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Ketterslee can do literally anything in the studio and Amortentia owns the recordings.” 

“At least they didn’t catch ‘Horsemen’ and ‘The Professor in Exile,’” said Imani. The latter featured instrumentals by herself and Flora and lyrics by Jack about wizarding public schools’ propensity to shuffle around predatory teachers when they were caught, and the former was a song Ras had written about magical conspiracy theories, once relegated to the back pages of the _Quibbler_ , which had been proven to be fact. “Jack, I can already think of pieces of ‘Black Magic’ we can switch up. And when we finish out our contract we can self-release ‘Mud Blood Blues’ and all the original versions.” 

It did not escape Jack that all three songs they had been asked to cut or change felt like his. At least, in all three cases, he was responsible for their inexcusable elements. They went together the four of them down to the basement and worked out new lyrics for “Black Magic” and “The Second War,” and in the end both songs were no less radical but a good deal more cryptic. Jack admitted begrudgingly he was satisfied with them, and they went back to Owlsblood and recorded the new vocal takes. They also recorded a quick-and-dirty two-minute punk cut of Ras’s that they’d been playing live since 1985, “Salem School,” which he’d written about two brothers from Nantucket who had bullied him as a thirteen-year-old until he’d hexed them with spells inspired by court notes from the witch trials. They switched up the tracklisting so that _Erebus and Terror_ opened with “The Second War;” “Salem School” took its place as track two. 

The record was released to widespread critical acclaim on February 7, 1988. It was on the top of the wizarding charts by Valentines’ Day and stayed in the top five until June. Much ink was quickly spilled about the opaque but cutting political nods in several songs (in both support and condemnation), but, contrary to Amortentia’s fears, the low-broiling controversy just helped Hobgoblins sell more records. 

On the day of the release of _Erebus and Terror_ they played a show at Poveglia, though Jack and Ras had not spoken in six weeks, and Jack had moved out of the house in Fortis Green and into a cheap apartment in Peckham, where he had started writing songs on a Hammond organ he’d bought at an estate sale and had had to magic through the upstairs bay window under cover of darkness. Amortentia had staunchly forbidden them to play “Mud Blood Blues” live, because they feared the band’s sets would be taped and bootlegged. Ras’s concurrence to this decree had engendered a fight between himself and Jack the week of Christmas: a fight to predictable effect, with many _how could you_ ’s lobbed in various directions, accusations of mental illness and/or drug abuse which were arguably founded in both cases, and finally a fistfight. They met before the record release show for a curry and agreed to put the whole thing aside though not a word was said of forgiveness. 

They were all four outside Poveglia with cigarettes prepping the setlist when Liz Grey from W.R.W. Apparated before them with a sharp and vivid clap. She was followed closely by her photographer, a mousy paparazzo sort who made a side living as a crime photographer with the MLE. As such all his work had a sensationalist Weegee-esque tone Jack begrudgingly admitted was cool, except when he himself was the subject of it. Then it just seemed rather uncanny and indeed frustrating that every in photograph of him in wizarding London’s foremost weekly music rag he looked dearly high, extremely sweaty, and sick with longing. “I’m just trying to capture my subjects at the height of emotion,” the photographer had explained when Jack had attempted to mildly confront him about it, and after that the longing-sick look seemed to have become even more apparent. As such he had been trying to look down and/or not at Ras when Grey and the photographer appeared. This was rather complicated at this juncture because Ras’s hand was on his thigh (for Ras’s part he seemed to have never shirked even in the face of the band’s increasing fame the piece of him which enjoyed nothing more than attempting to convince his family’s lawyers he was living a life out of the Marquis du Sade). 

As such the whole endeavor was doomed from the start. Besides even when Jack thought he went a whole interview without saying something regrettable Liz Grey had a way of editing things down to make them completely mortifying. Ras loved this, obviously. Jack didn’t, especially because she had somehow discovered why he’d been expelled from Hogwarts and often asked him to address it. That was part of why he’d written “The Professor in Exile.” 

Liz Grey bummed a cigarette and asked for an interview and they reluctantly consented. She drew from her coat a roll of parchment and her dreaded Quick Quotes Quill and set to business. “Guys — and girls. Your second album release show. I could go on for hours about _Erebus and Terror_ but… how does it feel to have released it?” 

“Climactic,” said Ras delightedly. “Like a kind of — final consummation — ” 

“It does feel rather like relief, or like a release,” said Imani. 

“To me, more like, if your period’s late, but then like a week later, when you’ve already started like doomedly planning baby names and all that, all of a sudden you wake up and your bed is full of blood,” Flora said. “More like that than like an orgasm.” 

“What about you, Jack?” 

“To me it feels like, we’ve been sailing on for months through the Arctic, and all of us are going utterly mad with lead poisoning in this sort of floating icebound Bedlam, but now the ice has sort of started to break up and — ”

Imani and Flora and Ras were laughing. But Liz Grey said, “You aren’t going to pick up what your bandmates are putting down here?” 

“Jackie’s been made out to be the sexual deviant among us,” Ras said, and he squeezed Jack’s thigh. The photographer’s bulb flashed like a phosphorous explosion. “But it’s all smoke and mirrors, isn’t it love.” 

“Yes,” Jack interjected, feeling vengeful, as had become unfortunately customary. “It’s all an act and wouldn't you know it’s an immense relief to come clean about it. I don’t own a single piece of bondage equipment… and I never ended up having to prostitute myself for shows…” 

“Wait — you never ended up having — ”

“Well it was briefly on the table but I got around it. We’re quite conniving, you see.” 

“I didn’t know about any of this,” said Ras indignantly. 

Flora laughed. “You’re a blind old bat Stubs if you didn’t see wossname at — well, I won’t out the bastard. Staring at Jackie’s ass like it was made of gold.” 

“We always thought pay to play was a bit inauthentic,” Jack said to Liz Grey. “Regardless of the method of payment in question. Our music’s too good for that. It was a matter of keeping the faith which was bloody difficult for a while.” 

“So now that you’re above and beyond that — with a real record deal — a second LP seeing rave early reviews — ” 

“Like I said. It feels like the ice has started to break up and we can keep on our certainly doomed voyage through the Northwest Passage. Losing our bloody minds all the while. That’s what this record is about after all.” 

“Why do you say _certainly doomed_ ,” Ras asked, quietly, as if would keep Liz Grey and the Quick Quotes Quill from hearing it. He had leaned in toward Jack with his bright inquisitive concerned eyes as though it were just the two of them alone again in his bedroom in the Fortis Green house: either this works or death or it works and death. As though he weren’t the one who had been the first to say, in not so many words, _this compete endeavor is Certainly Doomed_. 

The photographer’s flashbulb burst again like a solar flare. Jack could smell Ras’s breath (smoke and mint), his warmth, his hair. “Because it is,” he said. “Everything’s doomed. At least it’s very probable we won’t eat each other like Franklin and his crew did. At least not literally.”

\--

Things were charged as such on Hobgoblins’ subsequent European tour in support of _Erebus and Terror_ , and worsened when Jack was nearly killed in Belgrade by a suit of armor in their green room which had been bewitched to stalk wizards and witches of impure blood. The club’s promoters insisted (as their bartender, who was working on a healer’s degree from the Wizarding University of Serbia, bound the slash across Jack’s shoulder in shreds of cloth napkin) they had had no idea as to the enchantment, but the damage was done. 

1988 was a dark year for those who hoped any sort of lasting peace had come out of the war with Voldemort. In May there was a mass Muggle killing in a coastal district of Wales, and in August every Muggle-born and half-blood professor was dismissed from Durmstrang Institute, inspiring numerous other conservative academies of magic to do just the same. Ras looked at Jack most of the time with a confused sympathy. In their van they sat in different rows and listened to different music which they did not discuss with each other. Imani and Flora did most of the talking in interviews, and to the band’s fans. Often Jack caught them speaking in whispers to each other with their faces very close and felt sick. He was not yet so paranoid to suspect that they were always talking about him when they did this, but something else about it made him feel like puking. 

Something would have to come of it and this was very apparent. Something would have to come of it but it was not immediately clear what that something might be. Perhaps when it finally happened it would hurt. It would be a good, sharp, tearing hurt, Jack imagined, to counter the way it presently hurt, which was very deep and raw, aching, low in his gut, like something torn. 

He was desperately afraid of more than he could name. He longed to be back in the house at Fortis Green though he could not say with any certainty it was safer than his Peckham apartment. It was so in his memory but he suspected this was only because he remembered it with such fondness. Sitting on the floor in the drawing room with Ras writing music where nothing could touch them. They were ensconced together in some protective magic he couldn’t reproduce himself if he tried. They could afford a hotel room each now and Jack sat on the edge of his bed with his guitar trying to convince himself to get up and go down the hall. But he couldn’t — he didn’t dare. 

In July when they returned to London from tour Jack went out to a pub in Peckham for a drink. He was rather less surprised than he should have been, because he was extremely drunk, when Rorschach arrived around midnight. Later he would wonder exactly what kind of scrying Rorschach had done to find him, and he would attempt to think as critically as he could at the juncture about why he might’ve done such a thing. They went back to Jack’s apartment and did a line each of coke he had in an old film canister in his sock drawer. They were talking about something he later struggled to remember. At the time it had seemed relevant. He’d turned his back for a moment; he’d forgotten why. Perhaps he was thinking they would sleep together again. Outside the window the moon in the bleached-out sky was full. He was remembering the song he'd written for Lupin. _They can take your soul and mine with it_ … 

When he turned back around Rorschach had taken something out from the inside pocket of his tweed coat. It was something very dark in a glass vial capped with gold. He held it aloft and it caught the streetlight and Jack saw it was a kind of black-silver, cloudy and wet, like mercury; it reminded him of the physical memories in a Pensieve more than it reminded him of blood. It was not unbeautiful but with it came a sort of weighty ear-ringing silence as though everything happening on the street had suddenly stopped. Which he supposed it might have. 

“You think too much,” Rorschach said. 

This was true. 

“It’s lovely,” Rorschach said, “not to think at all.” 

Like a spell. Jack took a step forward. The syringe, when Rorschach took it also forth from his coat pocket, was made of bone. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the music from chapters 5 and 6 is linked [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/153841046575/i-just-posted-chapters-5-and-6-of-a-handful-of).

V. 

The following article (translated from the French) about the Hobgoblins’ European tour, beginning later that summer and extending into the autumn, was published in the Marseillaise wizarding music magazine _Le Pop Magique_ in October 1988, alongside photographs of the band taken at their show in the crypt of the abandoned typhoid hospital on the Ile Ratonneau. An image of the band on the lawn after their set, sweat-drenched and exhausted, was used in much of Amortentia’s press material for _Decline and Fall_. In it Jack is sitting away from the rest of the band. He does not yet look quite as skeletal or haunted as he would in later images from this period, which was likely why the label elected to use it for publicity purposes. He himself would remember this photograph for years as one of the last in which he thought he looked handsome. Imani and Flora look illegible as ever and Ras looks thin about the face and worried. The photographer’s flash has whited out everyone’s faces (Imani would later joke this was probably another reason why the label wanted to use the photograph) and cast their eyes like deer in headlights. 

_Papers from the United Kingdom — wizarding and otherwise — have smacked these days of gloom and doom: taxes, war, welfare, strife, drugs… not to mention the uncertain vanquishment of a certain Lord Voldemort or, at the very least, his Dark ideology. Yet the dismal isle’s biggest wizarding record labels have joyously turned out for the last two decades apolitical garbage aimed at fomenting no more revolutionary sentiment than very pathetic dance crazes. Until the Hobgoblins._

_The band constitutes four beautiful young misfits, ranking among them Imani, a descendant of Ghanian wizarding royalty’s court musicians, heiress to the most secret and sacred drum poetry in West Africa — Flora, a somewhat more frightening short-haired Viv Albertine with the first lines of Solanas’s S.C.U.M. Manifesto tattooed in moving wizarding ink on her thigh — Stubby, his appearance and mannerisms very like those of the mad final son of an old English family of property, living out ecstatic excess in the wreckage of his ancestral halls — and Jack, a creature of stunning and alien tragedy, a picture of despoiled innocence, a sort of 20th century Rimbaud with the_ sang-licornique [untranslatable French hyphenate which refers to unicorn blood and its attendant curse — Ed.]. _Together their magnificent noise is hyper-intelligent catchy punk, mad and thrashing, charged with a sense of loss and failure._

_“It’s all owing to the dismal state of wizarding governance at present in the United Kingdom,” Stubby says, when I corner him after the show and beg a quick interview. He keeps looking over my shoulder and around the room, presumably for Jack, who’s nowhere to be found. “It disappoints and frightens us all to be honest when we think about the future. So we attempt very sincerely not to. But the label doesn’t want me saying any more.”_

_I ask him about the girls — “We would have crashed and burned spectacularly in ’84 without the girls. They’ve saved our lives more than once apiece. I think Mani did for certain just the other day” — and about Jack. To this question it takes him a little longer to respond, and he bums a cigarette from me. We share a tight laugh, as we both dislike Gauloises, but it’s all I’ve got._

_“Jack is like the ancient mirror of my soul in another person,” Stubby says. “You know what I mean? He’s the piece I was missing when I was born. My soulmate I would say if it didn’t have — connotations. I’ll love him til the day I die, because I have to. Last time I ate mushrooms I had the idea that neither of us could live if the other died. We’re connected by some sort of black thread. I don't know what it is.”_

_“I can almost see it between the two of you on some songs,” I tell him._

_He looks almost relieved to hear this might be at least a collective hallucination. “It’ll be the death of both of us,” he says, “I’m certain of it.” And he fixes me with his bright, intelligent eyes, as though poised to perform leglimency. I expect he’s going to say, let’s take all that off the record, but he doesn’t. He clasps my shoulder in his warm and clammy hand. I feel like a messenger but to whom I’m uncertain. Then he says, “Thanks for the cigarette.”_

It is unlikely any of the Hobgoblins saw the article until the end of the tour. It is unlikely Imani and Flora saw it at all; they famously did not read press, and anyway precious little press was about them. Imani would later shut down rumors she was in any way connected to the Ghanian family of court musicians as an “insidious racist fallacy” in the black witches’ magazine _La Chatte Noire_ in 1992. 

The band’s representatives at Amortentia certainly saw the article and after a few meetings behind closed doors decided it was likely best to maintain the illusion, if it was an indeed an illusion, that Jack was _avec le sang-licornique._ Jack himself discovered the article upon his return to London, and he he tore out the interview with Ras and taped it to the wall beside his bed, where it remained until El Rice went by the Peckham apartment in May 1991 to clean it up after Jack’s sentencing. Taped alongside it was the photograph of the four of them on the steps of the W.R.W. offices in March 1986, and Lupin’s photo of Jack and Ras in studio B at M3MGC after their first ever live set. El mailed all these materials to Jack at Byberry but it is unclear what subsequently became of them. 

\--

The self himself in the mirror when he realized it was himself he was looking at was bleached-out grey looking like having been run several times through an industrial washing machine. He was wearing a Crushing Valerian shirt that must have belonged to Ras and outside beyond the far bay window he had partially newspapered over in a fit of something either it was snowing heavily or the rest of the world had at last dissolved. It took him a little while to realize that the text on the back of his arm said _in the garden_. He had been thinking it was a stain having risen to the surface like the rest of the stain. He looked for a while at the veins inside his arms which were just visible in blue track beneath the paper-thin and colorless-seeming skin. He imagined them like a sort of underground subway network carrying a fatal reality of blood trapped and screaming. Inside his left elbow was a little silvery bruise. And on the stereo was Spacemen 3’s _Perfect Prescription_.

I’m such a cliche, Jack thought, with an uncharacteristic self-awareness. It was like the self in the mirror thought it and said it to him. Such — I’m such — 

He got up (the room spun) and turned the record off and went to the Hammond organ. He’d left a bottle of Jameson out at some juncture he’d forgotten but it was empty. The trick, he’d learned, was to write into the curse. Lean into it and force against it, like a door, but soft. When he could feel it opening he would quit writing and take another dose. 

The songs were strange and he rarely recorded them. He didn’t think they sounded like Spacemen 3 or like any of his and Ras’s former collective inspirations at all. They sounded like something else from somewhere else. Sometimes he imagined them as tiny creatures he was obliged to fight. Otherwise as dead pieces of himself washed out of him like ropes of clotted blood. He sat on the couch or at the Hammond organ and wrote for hours until he started shaking and the room started getting darker. At first he thought the darkness just had to do with the ending of the day or the clouds changing but then he realized certainly it was the initial manifestation of the curse. When he was high he wasn’t afraid of it because it seemed impossible as did each and every one of his fears and when he wasn’t it felt like what he imagined dementors did, having never met one. When he did record the songs sometimes they were hours long and usually he couldn’t listen to them. They started out unfocused and blissful and at the end of them they turned very gothic. 

These twenty or so cassettes, referred to by fans as the Denman Road Tapes after the street on which Jack lived at the time, would wind up in the possession of the Boardman estate when Jack was in prison and Ras at St. Kelly’s. Thus it is likely the first person to have heard them was Whyland Boardman, in summer 1991, as she assumed her chair on the Wizengamot. Ras would later cut the more musical segments into a mixdown he brought to Jack in prison and asked if he could either give over to Amortentia or self-release. Jack declined, and it is unclear what Ras did with the tape. Only two concepts initially sketched out on the Denman Road Tapes made it onto Jack’s 1995 solo album, and none of them were considered for _Decline and Fall_. 

Ras had sent owls that Jack had not answered, but in November just after they returned from tour Jack had gone to the door of the Fortis Green house and knocked for at least an hour, until the darkness had begun to swarm around him so solidly real he could almost touch it and he was obliged to hide in the brush and Apparate back to the Peckham apartment for a dose. He could not have been certain Ras was home except for a sort of feeling, like a glow from inside, light, warmth; he wanted to be back there desperately, home again, in his bedroom, in the kitchen or the sitting room, listening to records, playing guitar, laughing… Some days he felt like an exile from his own life. Like perhaps it was still going on somewhere but the piece of his consciousness he currently inhabited had somehow wandered out of his body and away from the rest of it. 

\--

In January 1989 Mitzi Love at Amortentia somehow finagled for the Hobgoblins a set on the UK’s wizarding public radio network, WPR, in their live performance hour, _Magic Music Now!_ Ras, Imani, and particularly Flora had grown up in wizarding households with WPR pretty much perpetually blaring in the background; they all remembered hearing the Occlumen perform in the mid-seventies, and Celestina Warbeck after the release of her first chart-topping LP (Jack at this time of course had not known he could do magic or even that magic existed and spent much of his time listening to church choir music and taped sermons with his parents in their Brixton flat). WPR was decidedly aligned with the _Prophet_ and as such all too often with the Ministry and thus during the war had forsaken their music programming indefinitely in favor of much fear-mongering and propagandistic news reporting. In the ten years since they had remained remarkably mainstream and unchallenging. _Magic Music Now!_ was broadcast once every two weeks and usually featured traditional or classical music, largely from the British Isles, though occasionally whoever booked the performers got ballsy and invited wizarding samba groups and other such worldly acts to build their appearance of diversity. 

Ras had little doubt Mitzi had bribed the booker or something in order to get them the show. “You do realize we’re likely to be the first electric guitar band in that studio since the Occlumen, right?” he asked in the van on the way. 

With practice Jack had perfected just the right cocktail of cocaine to do on top of the dose of unicorn blood to be vaguely functional. But it was so vaguely functional that almost all he could do was watch out the window and hold his cigarette without dropping it. 

“Weird Sisters was on after _Lethifolding_ came out,” Flora said. She was bouncing her knee, fast and nervous, and she kept sneaking pointed looks at Jack he didn't have the faculty to decipher. 

Ras scoffed. “They hardly count as an electric guitar band.” 

“They’ve gone a bit metal lately,” Imani said from the driver’s seat. “What’s that new single — ”

Ras did a bit of howling impression of it — “I got that ol’ kneazle fever rottin’ my bones!” — and a chill went up Jack’s spine. He made a sound he intended to be a laugh. Ras reached back from the front seat and clasped his knee in a way he probably hoped to be grounding. “ _Lethifolding_ is an alright record,” he conceded. 

“Sacrilege,” Jack thought he said. “Who _are_ you?” 

He must indeed have said it or something else funny-ish because Imani laughed. She was looking at him in the rearview mirror a slice of her bright smart eyes into the sleepless-reddened corners of which she had pressed pale jewels. 

“Wagtail’s at his best when he sings about other than hippogriff dance moves,” Ras said. 

“He used to be a magical zoologist in the Department at Oxford,” Flora said with moderate sarcasm. “Just playing devil’s advocate but it’s actually his passion and his literal background.” 

“I don’t sing about magical law! Jack doesn’t sing about the history of magical photography…” 

“But you both sing about all your Arthurian bullshit.” 

Ras crossed his arms over his chest petulantly and he fixed Imani with a look. The smile spread across Jack’s face almost unbidden, some muscle memory vestige of a time when he felt that warm possessing fondness without a muted chemical tempering… 

“It’s different,” said Ras. Imani and Flora and Jack laughed. 

“How so’s it different,” Jack asked. 

“I won’t get sentimental in the van.” 

“What about outside the van.” 

“On the radio?” 

They pulled up to the studio and loaded in and set up laughing together like Old Times and by about fifteen minutes before their set Jack started to feel like he was actually walking around inside his own body and could coordinate moderately his hands on his guitar and his voice in his mouth and his magic for the effects. Together while the DJ and engineer set everything up in the other room they transcribed their setlist, a shortened cut of the run they’d played on their tour for _Erebus and Terror —_ “The Second War,” “The Professor in Exile,” “When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog,” “The Hex,” et cetera — and duplicated it for each of them with a _gemino_ spell Imani could now cast wandlessly just through practice. 

In the booth the engineer counted down from ten with his fingers so they could see it. Jack could feel Ras watching him with an illegible concern. It was just like playing on El Rice’s radio show, Jack thought, and when he closed his eyes he felt almost like they were there, in the studio at MGC, and he had nearly convinced himself that when he opened his eyes again he would be looking at El and Lupin in the other booth smoking a joint and laughing, but instead when he opened his eyes the darkness had started sending tendrils down, like vines or like smoke, into the corners of his vision. 

_Fuck._

They would be obliged to play for forty minutes, he recalled as his heart picked up nervous energy. He was not yet enough of an expert at this drug to know how long he had before things got really truly bad. At least he was still up a little from the coke. Flora’s eyes had fixed his, and he heard Imani start the drumroll that opened “The Second War.” 

In their eyes it went horribly, like purely horribly, and they would long regard it as the worst show they ever played, which was mostly Jack’s fault. As such immediately after the set (leaving his guitar leant up against his amp) Jack Apparated back to the Denman Road flat to take a dose, leaving the rest of the band to clean up and humiliatedly load out. Mitzi Love at Amortentia sent them each an owl the next day congratulating them on such a winning performance, but they were always uncertain as to her honesty or motivations. They were never invited to play on WPR again, but tapes of the performance were traded for years among Hobgoblins fans. Many cringed over the sloppiness (Jack and Ras’s guitars were hideously out of tune, and more than once they were playing and singing different parts of different songs; Imani and Flora attempted valiantly to keep the beat, but couldn’t help being pulled off course) but others argued for the session’s messy, abstract, Shaggs-ian genius. It certainly did not gain them many new fans, but it galvanized existing fans to start investigating in whatever way they could exactly what was going on. As such they would later mark the session as the beginning of the maelstrom of curiosity and voyeurism and general car-wreck rubbernecking that characterized the general mood leading up to the November 1990 release of _Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins_. 

\--

In Jack’s scrambled mind it seemed like the same day repeated itself over and over occasionally interrupted by circumstance which seemed to form out of the purgatorial ether like a thundercloud. On one such day he was sitting on the couch listening to a sound, and after not so very long he realized that the sound was someone knocking on the door. It seemed they had been knocking for a very long time. They had started out knocking rhythmically, or it had seemed rhythmic, and now it was patterning out almost abstractly, like a John Cage piece. He listened to it for a while and the sound filled his head and moved around and moved away. Then he remembered that when someone knocked at the door the thing you were supposed to do was open it. 

It was Ras, who was magically floating two coffees in the air beside him rather brazenly though the street was empty and quiet but for the howling March wind. He stepped in, the coffees following him like strange birds, before Jack could do anything about it. He was wearing his guitar on his back in an embroidered velvet soft case and he looked thin around the cheekbones. The edge of madness was not so much an edge anymore as a kind of symptom of the whole face and the bright pale green of his eyes seemed electric and staggering. Someone had braided a few strands of his hair part framing his face and the end of it touched his upper lip; Jack wondered abstractly who had done it but felt not much. 

“Took you long enough, love,” said Ras. “Warming charm might’ve worn off on your coffee.” 

He was trying very hard not to look around the room with horror, Jack could tell. 

“I was in the other — how did you get my address?” 

Ras cocked an eyebrow. “Liz Grey.” 

“Why would she — ”

“I was going to get her drunk and Leglimance her but in the end all she wanted was an exclusive. So I gave her one. Your name’s kept out of it,” he said, brow tightening, “or at least nearly all.” 

“What kind of exclusive?” 

“A lot of wankery about My Struggle with Mental Illness,” Ras said. “Whyland’s going to eviscerate me. About half of it is true. For instance I’ve never been institutionalized. You heard it here first! But now I really need a cigarette.” 

The cigarettes were on the coffee table in the living room along with all the drugs and paraphernalia that Rorschach supplied to Jack in his weekly visits in exchange for a goodly portion of his royalty galleons from sales of _Erebus and Terror_ and the assorted Hobgoblins zines. He swept and stacked everything into a corner and covered it with a week-old _Prophet_ so Ras wouldn’t have to look at it. He had sat down on the couch and stretched his legs out and was holding both coffees. “Davy,” he said, and at first Jack wasn’t sure what he was talking about. “Davy Rorschach?” 

His face betrayed not much. 

“It’s just I haven’t heard from him in a while and I’d figured he’d found someone more interesting.” 

“You probably could’ve asked him where I lived,” Jack said. “Or you might’ve magicked it.” 

A thing about Ras was that he liked to have a sort of collateral. He had set it up so that there was already a sort of transactionality about this whole scenario. Do you see what I had to do to find you? Be that as it may there was still the old sad longing part of Jack that felt growing toward him, like the sun. He understood he could no longer be sure what was rational thinking and what was not. When he sat down Ras pressed one of the coffees into his hand and didn’t let go. 

“Are you alright?” 

“Yes.” 

“You have clean needles and, and you’re measuring doses — ”

In fact neither of these was true. “Ras…” 

“We have a three album contract and I’m not doing this without you.” 

“So one more, then — ”

“Shut up, asshole, that’s not what I meant, and you know it.” But he said this with a kind of bruised fondness, and he was holding Jack’s hands and his were warm, and the ember of his cigarette ashed on the knee of Jack’s black pants. He traced Jack’s thumbs and his fingers and inside his wrist and on the back of it where the letters were smudged tattooed almost six years old now and turning pale inside his skin, and Jack closed his eyes. Incredible gentleness. It was almost very silent except for the sound from the street. “You know I love you,” Ras said. Like a birdcall. “I would do anything for you.” 

He almost could not remember why this was a lie. 

“You have to tell me what you need.” 

(I can’t — I can’t. I need — )

“You will,” Ras said, “just tell me you will, if you ever need anything, you’ll tell me.” 

“Yes,” he lied. His eyes were still closed. “Yes. I will.” 

Perhaps it wasn’t so much of a lie. After all he had been trying to tell Ras what he needed via the songs they had written together since 1983. Sometimes he couldn’t (wouldn’t) name it himself. But it was in the songs — it was the songs. 

Ras pressed forward and kissed his temple. If the tide was out any further he’d be weeping and he knew it. But it felt like almost nothing — just soft, and Ras’s lips were chapped, and he smelled like coffee and cigarettes. 

“I’ve a bit I wanted to play for you,” Ras said, and Jack opened his eyes. “Is that a Hammond organ?” 

“Yes. From a tag sale.” He got up with a bit of woozy effort and went to it and turned it on, bringing his cup of coffee and his cigarettes. “I futzed it with magic,” he said, and he could feel Ras behind him half-listening. He was taking advantage of Jack’s turned back to make assorted observations. “Rather a lot of magic. It has a mind of its own now I think.” Sometimes he was certain it was alive, and he spoke to it. On these occasions sometimes it would play the songs he had been writing on it back to him. “But it’s kind of like our old drum machine. Like a spiritual companion.” 

“Have you been writing on it?” 

“A little.” 

“They’ve been on my ass already about a new record,” said Ras. He got up from the couch and Jack made room for him on the bench. He too went for the bottle of Jameson when he first sat down but abandoned it when he realized it was empty and started tuning his guitar, which he’d unzipped from the soft case. “I’ve been writing a little too. Things are — I can feel, you know, the rotten piece in my brain liquefying.” 

“Does Whyland — ” 

“She and I had somewhat of a falling out to tell you the truth. But I don’t want to speak about it.” 

“But — are you seeing a doctor or — ”

“Jackie,” said Ras, like he was slamming a door, “after all, after all this, and we’re sitting together in your fucking tenement shithole, with controlled substances and Knockturn Alley syringes on your coffee table, and you look like you haven’t eaten or slept in six months, after all the agony in stony places et cetera, you don't get to ask me, am I seeing a doctor.” 

“So you’re not.” 

“Of course I’m not. Are you? Will you fucking quit shooting unicorn blood?” 

Jack couldn’t think of a rebuttal quickly enough and besides Ras had started playing something on the guitar. It started as a kind of abstract noodling that was very like Ras, which was to say it was kind of like a faster and more punk Smiths and/or something off the Clean live cassette they’d picked up in Christchurch while touring _With the Hobgoblins_. Also very clearly he had been listening to Flora’s old Krautrock records while stoned. 

Two years or so later in St. Kelly’s Ras would be diagnosed bipolar which made sense to Jack retroactively. In his manic state the music he wrote felt like running across the moor in the night possessed by demons rabid with a screaming something that was not quite happiness so much as it was energy. A clean and pure and burning raw energy like your inside scorched of impurities. He didn’t write much in the depressive state but when he did they were slow, plodding gothic ballads. Few of them were released as Hobgoblins tracks but a few found their way to Ras’s 1993 solo album, _In Felicitas_. Much of his conversation with Liz Grey, eventually published in W.R.W. under the headline _Stubby Opens Up: ‘My Private Struggle_ ,’ profiled his self-psychoanalysis as a kind of Freudian enfant terrible who saw centuries of his family history and early sexual-ish encounters as formative of a kind of unceasing, possessing emotional thrill-ride. Predictably, Liz had also made hay of every time Ras had mentioned Jack, embossing those quotes in glossy ink that changed colors: “Jack is like my second half — my other half.” Ras didn’t mind this, or at least he never spoke about it; Jack might’ve, were he not usually high. 

“It sounds like ‘Point That Thing Somewhere Else,’” Jack told Ras. 

Ras kept playing for a minute, head cocked, listening, but then he stopped and said, “Damn, yeah. It does.” 

He had thought of something in the time between speaking. He pressed some keys and the sound — his wand was set on top of the organ where he kept it these days and he tapped it once against the panel of effects. “Play it again,” he told Ras. 

Ras did and Jack followed along with him on the Hammond organ. He used the upper keyboard for percussion only and used it to draw a different rhythm out of Ras’s guitar playing. Then he cast another spell for effect on the lower keyboard and played jagged, sustained notes to accent Ras’s chord changes. 

After a few minutes it was only like “Point That Thing Somewhere Else” anymore in that Jack felt like they could play it for an hour if they wanted. Ras leaned back against him and the fabric of his wool sweater was itchy and warm against Jack’s bare arm. A line for the lyrics started to stand out to him and he hummed it. Then Ras sang, but he spoke more than he sang, like some of the other songs from their Clean cassette, but it was rhythmic and cutting, and Jack recognized the words, like the incantation to an old spell, with a cold blunt chill: 

_You thought it foolish to ruin your life for love,_  
_To take a bullet for love,_  
_Scorched earth for love_  
_Soul stripped bare for love_  
_Well I want to know what you think  
_ _Now it’s all gone_

\--

After not so very long Ras Apparated back to the Fortis Green house to fetch his old tape recorder and some blank cassettes. While he was gone Jack measured out a dose from Rorschach’s vial that would keep him up but wouldn’t put him under and gave himself the shot and opened all the windows and had a cigarette. Dimly he realized it was cold and perhaps he was hungry or else the gnawing in his stomach, prowling at a sort of low volume, was something else entirely. Eventually he put water on for tea and began to entertain the possibility that Ras wouldn’t come back. The chill went through him like a bolt of glass. He put the lights on to keep the dark away, and at last he sat on the couch. The teakettle started screaming in the kitchen but he had started scratching at the tattoo on the back of his forearm and he was listening instead to that sound but he almost didn't hear it until it went away. Ras had taken hold of his wrist and held it still. He was carrying the cassette recorder under one arm and his cheeks were pink with cold. 

“Your kettle’s boiling,” he said. 

“I can — I suppose it is.” 

He got up; the room wasn’t spinning so much as things in it seemed to have been moved around, but he could not say exactly how so. Ras was following him and closing all the windows. “Aren’t you cold,” he said. 

“I know it’s cold but I don’t feel cold.” 

This seemed to him the exact function of the drug. Logically he knew he should feel some way (cold, hungry, tired, hurt, afraid) but he did not — could not. Unless the tide went too far out. He made them tea and Ras dug a package of stale biscuits out of the cupboards and arranged them onto a chipped blue china plate. Then they went together back into the living room to record. 

This two-week writing and demoing session, later referred to by fans as the Corbenic Sessions after the text Jack would later carve onto each tape with a knife, sourced much of the material that would eventually be recorded (again by the producer Sam Ketterslee) in a studio with Imani and Flora and released as the band’s third and final LP, _Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins_. The auspicious titles of both the sessions and the LP were taken as yet another hint at Jack’s divination prowess, but in reality on day six or something Ras had been looking through Jack’s books and had re-read “The Waste Land.” As he told W.R.W. in 1995: 

_SB: He was passed out on the couch and I was wandering around the flat. I’d put on Brian Eno — well, we were listening to_ Discreet Music _then a lot. I sort of got this idea in my head that it calmed him down but I’m not sure that was true. Probably it just calmed me down. But he was asleep, or rather he was knocked-out high. I kept going over to check he was breathing. He never liked shooting up in front of me. He had all these books in boxes still and I’d dug out his old book of Eliot just on a whim I suppose. You know I saw him for the first time in — we had this mythic history of England class at the MGC. We didn’t know each other then at all. I sat with him and read “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” and “Prufrock” again and listened to the music and wept a little. You know I am not really a crier or I suppose not much. It was more crying out of nostalgia than out of sadness._

_WRW: Nostalgia for what?_

_SB: Something that — I don’t know if it ever even existed. Which I suppose was why I missed it so much. But it was then I decided we had to name the record after something like that feeling. Jack came up with_ Decline and Fall _because he loves Evelyn Waugh._

The songs were heavily influenced by the Clean live cassette, which eventually Ras just brought over from the Fortis Green house. During the eventual recording of the LP tensions were high and everyone was listening to Nirvana’s _Bleach_ so as such the final full-band versions have a heavy, grungy edge, helped along by Ketterslee’s engineering. The Corbenic takes are simpler by necessity, recorded live to tape, unmixed and unmagicked and unmastered, intercut with Jack and Ras’s whispered arguing. More than one recording features Ras solo, suggesting Jack was passed out. Others bear the strains of Eno’s _Discreet Music_ echoing in the background; they had forgotten to turn off the record player. 

The first song they had written, launching the sessions, was completed and recorded first. Perhaps by virtue of this position it wound up the lead single and first track on _Decline and Fall_. Ras wanted to call it “Stripped” but Jack refused. In the end it was titled, without reference in the lyrics, “The Golden Bough.” Jack and Ras’s singing together on the demo version sounds almost shatterably fragile and at the end of the take when the last chord on the Hammond organ dies down the wind can be heard howling down Denman Road. The chorus, sung in tandem, was much interpreted: 

_You’re in my dreams_  
_My heart and soul_  
_My lips and teeth_  
_My grist and meat_  
_Blood shaking my heart  
_ _But you tear me apart_

They did not (could not) (would not) speak about much other than the songs. It was like a common secret never addressed that of course the songs were about all the things which could not be articulated. This was and had always been customary but it was worse now. It was like slitting one’s own throat now. Jack slept on the couch; Ras slept in the bed. In the morning they made tea and once Ras went down the road to the Muggle supermarket and bought about sixty frozen TV dinners which they subsisted on for the full two weeks. The label sent owls and Ras read them and customarily burned them immediately following. 

Rorschach came over in the early morning and Jack met him in the downstairs hallway while Ras was still asleep. “Can’t I come up?” Rorschach asked after the product and the galleons had changed hands. He had pressed forward a bit and his hand was almost touching Jack’s hip. His breath smelled like garlic and whiskey and his eyes were bloodshot; evidently he had been up all night and was making his rounds on his way home. Not for the first time Jack wondered where his unicorn blood supply came from — if he killed the creatures and exsanguinated them himself or if he bought the vials off someone who did. But he only thought like this when the tide was far out. Usually he didn’t think about it or anything at all. He could hardly any longer even see it as another creature’s blood. He had begun, disturbingly, he realized sometimes, to think of it as a kind of medicine. The cure for the darkness. Nevermind that it had caused the darkness to begin with. 

He went upstairs. Ras was on the couch with a cup of tea silent as he came in the door. They wrote, that day, with a jagged and lurching piano riff Jack had been working on abstractly for months, a song called “Le Sang:” 

_Inkblot testman at the door_  
_Strung-out hollow hanged and pale_  
_Telling me,“You want some more?”_  
_If I hadn’t — if I would_  
_(Red sails wide, drifting logs)_  
_Was this always in my blood?_  
_The river sweats and turns to mud_  
_(Down Greenwich reach, past Isle of Dogs)  
_ _Was this always in my blood?_

One more track from the sessions (later track 6 on the record) is plainly about unicorn blood — “Cure for the Darkness.” The music was written early in the sessions but the lyrics were finished later, toward the end, after the occasion of Jack’s first overdose. It was altogether not quite as bad as the second but still frightening. They had been working at the Hammond organ writing the very beginning of “A Handful of Dust” and outside the clouds had moved across the sun (later that night it would snow, though it was late in the season for it) and he was still addled enough from his earlier dose he had thought it was the darkness spreading inward. He wondered what it would do to him if it touched him, and he excused himself to the bathroom. His heart was slamming skips against the cage of ribs. In the mirror he looked hunted and haunted. Run ragged to the very end of his strength. He did not make a habit of looking at himself and he realized with a shock of guilt that Ras had had to look at him like this for days. 

If the darkness caught him he thought it might suffocate him like a heavy black blanket. Turn all his skin inside out. Crawl inside his brain and burrow outwards. Crunch him up — take hold of his body and break him like a toy. Very much later he learned none of this was true but that the thing it really did was perhaps worse. 

He sat on the edge of the bathtub and measured the dose. Silver black blood. He wondered what pure wizard’s blood looked like, but then he realized he knew already, because he had seen Ras’s blood. Red and bright. Just blood…

Ras came after him when he’d been gone twenty minutes and broke the door down with magic because Jack was in the bathtub passed out. He woke up there, maybe two hours later, like surfacing with sticky difficulty from some sweet golden depths, and Ras was sitting behind him, holding him, and his clammy palm was pressed up tightly against Jack’s heartbeat. 

“What — ”

“Shut up,” Ras said. “Shut up, fuck you. Shut up.” 

His voice was tight and cold and his breath quick and deep and ponderous against the shell of Jack’s ear. 

“You’re so thin,” Ras said, nervously. His hand tightened in the fabric of Jack’s shirt and Jack thought perhaps this might be a dream. Otherwise certainly he was dead. “What’s — what did I do?” 

His voice felt sticky. “You didn’t do anything.” 

“I remember when you didn’t lie to me. Fondly I remember.” 

“You didn’t — Ras. You didn’t do anything.” 

It was truer, he thought, than either of them knew. 

“It could kill you,” Ras said. “It will. If you aren’t careful. It has lots of ways to kill you.” 

“Like the withdrawal,” Jack reminded him. “The — the curse.” 

“We can find a clinic — we’ll get the best there is. We can afford it, with the advance from Amortentia. There are a few in Canada, where it’s decriminalized, very discreet, and I could — ” 

The thought of quitting was almost as bad as the thought of dying. “I can’t,” he said. 

“Why fucking can’t you?” 

I’m so afraid, he thought, didn’t say. And some of the fears can be named. And others cannot. 

“Your breath was like hardly there shallow,” Ras went on, “I tried _Enervate_ and it didn’t work.” 

“It doesn’t, with this stuff. Rorschach told me.” 

A mistake. Ras stiffened behind him and Jack heard him swallow. “I thought you were going to die. I was singing to you; did you hear it?” 

“No,” Jack said, “of course I didn’t. What were you singing?” 

He thought maybe it’d be one of their old songs just for the most sincere possible wounding guilt. But Ras said, “That new R.E.M. song. ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It.’” 

So help him that was when he started crying. Ras pressed his nose in the soft between Jack’s ear and jaw. It couldn’t — wouldn’t for much longer. Already it felt as though they had cheated something. For a while longer they sat in the bathtub, and eventually Jack fell asleep. He woke again later because Ras had Summoned his notebook and was writing lyrics in it and his quill scratched rhythmically. “What’s that,” Jack asked, sitting up. The ceiling was water-stained in big black rings and the tub was scummy and he felt uncomfortably damp, and through the hallway he could tell outside it was nearly dark. 

“For that one that sounds like the Chills. D’you think you could get up?” 

He was a little shaky but Ras helped him. They finished the song together at the piano: 

_There’s no cure for the darkness I know_  
_There’s no spell for the symptoms I show_  
_There’s no panacea or potion or bezoar  
_ _Even dragon oil salesmen don’t bother_

“It’s about both of us,” Ras said, uninvited. His eyes were big and warm and sweet. Usually he didn’t feel the need to point out something so obvious. “It’s not dissimilar,” he said. Grasping for straws — for whatever thread remained between them anymore. 

_Watching that big bad thing behind the door_  
_And the daylight spreading through upon the floor  
_ _Good God I love you but I can’t stand you anymore_

 --

On the final day — two weeks in — they fought. Ras in the 1995 W.R.W. interview: 

_WRW: This sensation of nostalgia for something that never existed — is that also where “A Handful of Dust” came from?_

_SB: Yes, kind of. That song was nearly all Jack. It was the last one we did together and I left in the middle of his writing it. Which sometimes — historically I have regretted fiercely. More for the sake of our — more for leaving him than for the song. Because part of me thinks, it would not be so good had Itouched it any more, and it’s his best — it’s our best, I think, the best thing we ever did together._

_WRW: I heard it started with a fight between you two._

_SB: Kind of. We had been working on it together for a few days, then we had a row and I left. But we had written the beginning together and Jack said, I want this to be my song going after that feeling. I was happy to give it to him because it felt like his song. I think I just gave it a push. He brought the demo in along with the rest of the Corbenic tapes when we went back to Owlsblood [Studios, Manchester] to record with [Sam] Ketterslee. We hadn’t spoken in weeks at that time but the song blew me away. I didn't even know that he had finished it._

_WRW: Flora told me that same thing just a few months ago when I interviewed Saint Rose._

_SB: We all were like — emotionally shredded, I can tell you, listening to the tape in the studio. Do your own thing with it, he kept saying. I don’t think he thinks it’s very good. It’s difficult for him to play it. It’s difficult for all of us to play it truth be told but for him most of all. Which I think is a signal that it’s a very good song._

_WRW: Do you think music should be difficult?_

_SB: Art in general should be difficult. Certainly for all of us it was difficult. That record was extremely difficult — everything about it. I do hope that it isn’t just in my head. That listening to it you can pick up — how bloody impossible everything was, how impossible we had made it, for ourselves, and for each other._

For a long time after it was difficult for Jack to remember what they had argued about in the first place. Probably the usual or perhaps he had said something. Sometimes he thought he knew what he had said or perhaps he had said it in a dream. It was like he opened his eyes and all the windows were open and Ras was gone. He sat at the organ. For a while he wondered if any of this was really happening. Then a car alarm went off in the street. 

For the next several years music journalists would ask Jack about the process of writing the song and indeed he was always forced to admit he could hardly remember. It seemed that sitting very still at the organ situated him in a kind of womb of numbness against the rest of the world which was very cold and sharp. Whatever he had said was still echoing in his mind but abstractly (like Steve Reich’s “Come Out”) until it sounded like nothing at all. He recalled he played a chord and then another. It turned into the beginning of the song he and Ras had been working on — “A Handful of Dust.” 

His guitar was beside the organ and he picked it up. He remembered wanting it to sound like dragging himself along the floor. A muted, creeping, hysterical, defeated desperation. Perhaps he was also thinking of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” He closed his eyes and behind his eyes were the rooms. Ras was in his bedroom reading _To the Lighthouse_ , and downstairs the sound was seeping up like water through the floor. 

_What to make of all this fear you left in me?_  
_Like will you leave me darling when the war comes?_  
_Like will you wait for me wherever after?  
_ _Like do you still keep my picture on the wall?_

It wound back around to another thing. He was deep in it now and it was all around him. He’d never been good at stitching disparate pieces together but it was like magnets. It was getting dark, and he shut his eyes. 

_I can show you the vault where I keep your trust_  
_All our sacred lore and our misspent lust_  
_I can show you the garden gate gone all to rust  
_ _I can show you fear in a handful of dust_

His singing sounded wrong by itself — hollow by itself. He could feel the moment when the song should shatter as a kind of weight lifted from his back and shoulders. 

_Do you know what you’ve done to me_  
_Do you know what you’ve done to me_  
_I can’t tell what I’ve done to you  
_ _I can’t tell what I’ve done to you_

It took him an hour or so to finish it all and record a live demo to cassette. Ras, thankfully, had left the tape recorder in his haste to depart. When it was done the room was black with the swarming summoning darkness and he felt bereft and deeply afraid. Like he had shed his skin or half his blood or both. He went to the couch and wrapped himself in a blanket (his teeth were chattering) and measured his dose from the vial and administered it. When he woke up again he guessed it was just after noon and his fingers and toes were numb. In the mirror in the bathroom when he went to piss his lips were blue. He shut the windows and made a cup of tea to warm up and eventually gathered the bravery or emotional numbness (these days he figured they were indistinguishable) to play the demo back. 

Original copies of the Corbenic Sessions tapes are worth hundreds of galleons at least, but to Jack it was hardly a bother that the rarity of the original demos meant only a select (very wealthy) few outside of the band would ever hear them. The recording of “A Handful of Dust” is almost unlistenably painful. Certainly he had written it to hurt even if he hadn’t intended to and certainly even (especially) if the person he intended to hurt was himself. His voice is hoarse from shouting and from singing and from cold and he stumbles over his own guitar bits and goes back sloppily to play them again. Sometimes he sing-talks to himself in a nightmarish lullaby tone. It sounds as though he has recently been crying. The guitar line is uncomplicated but unexpected and indeed atypical for Jack’s songwriting and sometimes it seems to have a mind or a life of its own. 

The version recorded with the full band for _Decline and Fall_ is itself special, and painful, though it owes something to Nirvana’s “About a Girl” and/or Slint’s “Carol.” It was never released as a single owing to the simple purpose that it was too long and dark for radio but it has subsequently been regarded as the Hobgoblins’ best recording by both the band’s fans and wizarding musical scholars of the period. Ras, who was the only member with sufficient commitment to the project and/or mental faculty to make such decisions for the band after the studio sessions in summer 1990 (Imani and Flora were backpacking in Mongolia; Jack was in in the proverbial gutter in Macclesfield), elected for “A Handful of Dust” to close out _Decline and Fall._ As such the full LP fades out with Ras and Jack’s voices wound together in brutal fugue tandem: “Do you know what you’ve done to me; I can’t tell what I’ve done to you…” 

The Hobgoblins played “A Handful of Dust” live only thrice on the doomed _Decline and Fall_ tour: at Poveglia on the night of the album’s release, in Glasgow in January 1991, and infamously in Leeds in February, as the closer (technically) of their final show. On Ras’s solo tour following the release of _In Felicitas_ in early ’93 he was known to lead into “Road to Longnor” with the lilting dragging opening he and Jack had written together on the Hammond organ; after all, it was the only part of the song to which he had contributed, beyond the obvious. 


	6. Chapter 6

VI. 

By the time the Hobgoblins recorded _Decline and Fall_ at Owlsblood in Manchester in June and July 1990 their growing legion of fans, the wizarding music press, and to some extent the wizarding press at large understood that something was afoot. Ras had been photographed by paparazzi on assignment from the wizarding tabloid _Quick Quotes Quill,_ dressed in one of his patterned silk smoking jackets and not much else, throwing a selection of seemingly random items out of the windows of the Fortis Green house, which had come to take on the appearance and local superstition of a sort of decaying gothic mansion in which one might find the desiccated corpse of a tenant’s dead lover. _QQQ_ published images of each dislodged object with speculation they might belong to Jack, and of course some did. Most of the items in fact were Ras’s own, but he had become convinced they had been enchanted and were being used to spy on him. _QQQ_ also photographed his sister Whyland, having intelligently used a Disillusionment charm on her face but distinguishable by her wool skirt suit, pounding on the door allegedly for hours. They published interviews with assorted other Boardmans eager for their fifteen minutes of tabloid fame, one of whom gleefully told the journalist that Ras had been “a bit atypical, mentally” since falling down the marble staircase at Rexley Hall in Shropshire (the grandest of the Boardman estates) as a toddler. They also interviewed his witch neighbor, two doors down, who suspected he was doing Dark magic behind closed doors, perhaps in the basement, because sometimes she smelled something foul, or overheard suspicious inhuman voices. 

Jack for his part was photographed by _QQQ_ coming out of private Knockturn Alley clubs so seedy they had no names, nor addresses. They were concealed from the general wizarding public by means of brilliant magic not unlike the variety on the Black estate in Grimmauld Place. To so much as see the door to the place one had to know it existed. He was also photographed in suspicious proximity to a Muggle harm reduction center for heroin addicts, where he had been obliged to go to have a nurse take care of the abscess inside his elbow. If he had gone to St. Mungo’s or a wizarding clinic it would have been tantamount to turning himself in on unicorn blood possession charges. The nurse was younger than him and kind but quiet and her hands were cold and after she had drained the abscess and bandaged the wound she brought him a cup of stale black coffee and some pamphlets for the center’s assorted discussion and recovery groups. Stuck in his head suddenly was a line from one of the songs he and Ras had written for _Decline and Fall_ — “there’s no cure for the darkness I know…” 

During the recording sessions, all four of the Hobgoblins were photographed coming and going between the studio in Manchester and the rooms they had taken in Salford. Imani and Flora were of less interest to the press and besides they had quickly ascertained the back entrances to the studio and back roads to their rented flat, and they would stay later in the studio to work with Ketterslee after Jack and Ras left simply to throw off whoever might be encamped outside. Ras would sometimes go out record shopping or to the wizarding district of Manchester after recording, where he signed things for fans and took photographs and pointedly did not answer questions about Jack, who was recognized in Macclesfield (beginning to be noted, in those days, as a key city in the recreational trade in unicorn blood) with Davis Rorschach, who had taken a holiday from whatever it was he did in London, toward the end of June. 

Most of the time Jack simply laid in the bed in the rooms in Salford high and listening loudly to Led Zeppelin IV and trying to figure out different things to do with “A Handful of Dust.” Somewhere and somehow he understood it was the best thing he’d ever done and was likely to ever do but it was not yet good enough. In the end he couldn’t figure it out himself, so he played the demo for the rest of the band and for Ketterslee, and the rest was history. It was the last track recorded for the record, on July 7, 1990. The moment when the song breaks is a kind of apotheosis of desperate frustration; by all accounts all four (and Ketterslee) were by this point at each other’s throats. Imani and Flora had brought in four songs for the record but Ras and Jack had only liked two, and for one of those two Flora had written lyrics for the boys to sing, which they also didn’t like, so they had written very different new ones. Not much of a conversation was ever had on the subject but concurrently the girls paid little credence to what Jack and Ras asked them to play. Magdalene Cruz, Liz Grey’s protege at W.R.W. and the later editor-in-chief of the magazine during the war years, would later argue in her five-star review of _Decline and Fall_ that this tension — the pent-up electric charge — at the record’s heart was what made it the Hobgoblins’ best: 

_It was all well and good when they loved each other (it was charming and a bit pastoral) but all of us remember that line from_ Brideshead Revisited _— “If it could only be like this always…” The charm of that novel, and the charm of this record, and the charm of the Hobgoblins, if I might be so frank, is that it sours, and that souring is the brutal nature of it (everything after all must rot), and that sometimes we can’t even tell why it sours, as Childermass sings on the final track, “A Handful of Dust,” his magnum opus in this writer’s eyes, “Do you know what you’ve done to me? I can’t tell what I’ve done to you…”_ Decline and Fall _is perhaps what the band have been attempting all along — learning to hate one another as much as they love one another_. 

\--

As Ras fought off _QQQ_ photographers and assorted absurd tabloid allegations in London in the months after the recording of the album Jack spent the rest of the summer in Macclesfield in a dark upstairs bedsit rented there by Davis Rorschach. He was rarely photographed here, because he rarely left the house. Rorschach, who had ingratiated himself likely by way of his money into the group of unicorn hunters who ran great carboys of silver-black blood out of the park heavily Disillusioned in the trunks of junker cars, provided much of what Jack required to survive, which in those days constituted two or three doses of unicorn blood daily, shitty whiskey, black coffee, burnt toast, and Campbell’s soup (he would accept tomato or chicken noodle). He sat in the bed and played guitar, though occasionally he missed the Hammond organ. One of the scant few times he left the house was to purchase a tape recorder at a Muggle electronics shop. Though Hobgoblins fans know Jack recorded much of what he wrote in Macclesfield to tape, these cassettes were never leaked. It is likely that a few songs from his 1995 solo album were sourced from these sessions (they are marked with a special annotation in the liner notes: _written on Paradise Street_ ). Sometimes he played bits and pieces he was proud of for Rorschach, who didn’t like Jack’s music, nor really any music, nor really anything, and as such would sit on the edge of the bed smoking and staring into space until Jack finished at which point he would say, “Sounds tops.” 

There are photographs from this period, though they are few and dark, and much of the film sat undeveloped in canisters until Jack’s release from Byberry in 1993. Some were published in a photo book called _Dissolution_ which came along with special edition orders of Jack’s solo album in 1995. Rorschach sitting on the end of the bed hunched with cigarette; in the stillness the smoke has a pallid texture. The pile of dishes in the sink in the pale dawn light through the high ashy window. Piles of books and tapes and papers strewn about on every flat surface pinned under vials and syringes and assorted works. Jack himself standing between two mirrors in the narrow dark hallway, black and white and vivid with shadow. His shoulderblades stand out like great rifts or broken wings in the back of his thin white shirt, and there is not much expression on his face, and his eyes seem almost blurred out. He was relieved, later, much later, when he developed the images in the Fortis Green house in summer 1993, that even in the worst of it he had maintained what the professors at MGC had called his eye. At the time he was nervous to develop them because he feared what he would see in them. Hauntings — Dark manifestations. Or, worse, a kind of physical, visual evidence of his disassembling. 

Toward the end of the summer he was struggling to write and he sat in bed playing the same guitar line over and over again for hours (later, it would become “Bad Blood” off his 1995 record, a kind of triple entendre partly referencing part two of Rimbaud’s _A Season in Hell_ ). It was a thousand degrees in the apartment because neither of them could be bothered casting air conditioning spells or going out to buy a Muggle AC, and Jack had begun condescending to let Rorschach measure doses for him which previously he had not dared, as he did not have an iota of Rorschach’s fearlessness nor his death wish. If they were sleeping together Jack didn’t remember it, which was probably for the best, but once or twice he woke up from the drug’s heavy stillness to find that Rorschach was stroking his face. He was so out of it at first (not to mention this behavior was so unlike Rorschach) that he didn’t realize where he was, or who he was with, and the grotesque and thick squalorous humidity of the flat felt suddenly like a womblike warm bath, quiet and motionless, and time itself was still. Rorschach thumbed his lower lip and the artful sallow curve of bone beneath the eye and the short hair at the nape of his neck where he desperately needed it cut (nowhere in Macclesfield would / could cut black hair, at least to Jack’s liking, and so in the end of it he would shave it all off in the bathroom sink the day before their return to London). After a long enough while Rorschach would shift, or Jack would regain his faculties enough to smell even from the other room the rotting odor of a full sink’s worth of dirty dishes, and the dream would dissipate like smoke or fog, and he would open his eyes feeling rather more bereft even than usual, watching up at the water-stained ceiling spreading black mold, unable or unwilling to move in the horrible pressing heat. “Another, love,” Rorschach would ask him, and he would say, shifting, opening up, unfolding, “Alright.” 

\--

In the middle of September Jack received an owl from Mitzi Love, which he ignored, and, the next day, a second from Ras, which he read when Rorschach was out with the unicorn hunters. 

_The record’s been mixed (I’ve enclosed a tape) and sounds brilliant. Amortentia wants us to play shows on it before its release (they are banking on 22 November presently) so as to “build buzz” and as such Poveglia’s offered us a residency through November. However Red Suit et al are refusing to sign paperwork unless you show up personally. I have tried to convince them you are an Artist and can do what you want but they aren’t buying it. So the girls and I would be altogether most grateful if you were to come back down to London._

_I just hope you are alright and still alive as I have not heard from you. Yet I know if anything had happened to you 1) it would be in the papers and 2) Davy would be here torturing me about it. I am dying to see like a tiny piece of your handwriting if I cannot hear your voice. I miss you tragically. — RQB_

The guilt tightened and curdled, nauseous, in his belly. He went to the tape recorder and put the record on. Much later he realized this was the only time he ever listened to it all the way through. Ras and Ketterslee had made it sound not unlike Slint’s _Tweez_ ; it was massive and sharp and shattering as glass, and the guitars sometimes sounded like chainsaws. Ras’s voice sounded angry and Jack’s sounded distant and high and the tone of their singing together sounded more than ever before like an argument. “A Handful of Dust” was seven minutes long and culminated with a long fadeout on their interwoven voices. In the middle of it Jack pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and laughed. Then he tore Ras’s letter in half and turned the parchment over and wrote on the back: 

_The record sounds exactly right. I am proud of you immeasurably and only hope you’re well. Don’t worry about me / I’ve got a bed I’ve got a Christmas tree inside my head etc._

_I can come down to London. Just tell me when and where to be to sign the papers for Poveglia. Love — JC_

\--

As though to prove time were as circular as Jack had come to believe, the Hobgoblins were contracted to perform at Poveglia Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights through the beginning of October to the release of _Decline and Fall_ on Thursday, November 22. Jack moved back to the Peckham flat nominally with Rorschach, though the latter did still have keys and unmitigated access to the loft belonging to his family in Soho and spent much of his time either throwing drug-fueled raves there or at the darker Knockturn Alley clubs until seven in the morning attempting to make inroads on behalf of his unicorn hunting friends in Macclesfield, who sent crows rather than owls with cryptic messages Rorschach burned upon reading. They did not send the unicorn blood itself by crow; Jack never knew exactly how Rorschach received the vials. On his own now most of the time he rehearsed the songs from _Decline and Fall_ and some of the older ones, and he tried to wean himself back to smaller doses but found after a week’s sweat and fear that he couldn’t manage it. 

For the remainder of September the Hobgoblins rehearsed for the Poveglia residency in a practice space owned by Amortentia in Chalk Farm, which they Apparated directly into to avoid being photographed. It was part of a mazelike complex of rehearsal spaces practiced in by Muggle bands, in what appeared to be a former underground bunker or storage facility. It reeked perpetually of cigarettes and spilled wine, and the air was vomitously still, and there was no toilet, nor were there windows. After enough acoustic magic from all four of them the room sounded acceptable (in that it probably sounded not unlike their house shows in Fortis Green had) but not much like the hall at Poveglia, which had been specifically architected and magicked to suit chamber music quartets. Their neighbors on either side were an electronic duo and a metal band, and sometimes the four Hobgoblins found themselves interrupted by noise in the middle of rehearsal. 

Imani and Flora wrote setlists from which they refused to deviate, likely as continued vengeance for the scrapping of their two songs in the _Decline and Fall_ recording sessions. Jack didn’t have the fortitude to argue and Ras, as such, gave up. They rehearsed “A Handful of Dust” all of once, and indeed in the full residency at Poveglia they would play it only on the last night. Privately Jack worried playing it live too regularly would drain some of the power from it. After rehearsal he would Apparate directly back to the Peckham flat to take a dose and would wake up hours later on the couch in the dark. He wasn’t certain what Imani and Flora and Ras did after practice but he imagined them together laughing at the pub or smoking pot in Regent’s Park, though logically, sometimes, he understood this was blatantly untrue. At practice they didn’t talk about much that was not the songs and even about the songs they talked only about what was necessary. 

By the end of the month they had decided upon a pool of songs from their three albums that would be eligible for the Poveglia setlists. It included nearly all of _Decline and Fall_ but for “A Handful of Dust” and “Gravesend Rag,” one of Imani and Flora’s cuts for the record, a lurching grungy blues number which proved unplayably complicated outside the studio (as such, it was often accoladed in reviews of the record as Imani and Flora’s best composition to date; they shared a producing credit on it with Ketterslee). It also included the known party-starters from _Erebus and Terror_ and _With the Hobgoblins_ , including “The Hex” (now imbued with new meaning), “The Second War,” “The Professor in Exile,” “Salem School,” “When I Said I Wanted to Be Your Dog,” “End of the River,” “Western Road Empire,” and even “In the Garden” and “Felix Felicis” — songs which, by that point, were seven and a half years old. As old as Jack and Ras’s friendship and their matching tattoos — as old as anything, as old as everything. 

The first three sets at Poveglia were sold out weeks prior. By this time any vaguely culturally informed witch or wizard in Great Britain, particularly those under age thirty, was at least vaguely curious about the goings-on of the band — whether they were rabid fans, aloof skeptics, hipsters who pretended not to care but secretly did, and/or Dark wizards in training who hate-listened with ire and wrote scathing letters to the editor of W.R.W. about the whole band’s (but particularly Jack and Flora’s) staunchly negative influence on “good” (eg. pure-blood) wizarding children. These letters of course were never published in the magazine but Magdalene Cruz showed a few to Jack in 1994, and a selection of particular indictments wound up collaged in the photo book, _Dissolution_. 

A few hours before the first Poveglia set the Hobgoblins condescended to the interview with Liz Grey and shoot with her photographer which would be their last as a quartet. It was unseasonably cold for October, and as such, though Jack could hardly feel it, Ras draped him in half the old white fur coat, and Imani wrapped her scarf around his neck and hers. In the photograph Flora’s arm is around Ras’s shoulders and his at her waist. Jack looks like the only thing keeping him from blowing over in the wrong sort of wind is Ras’s coat and Ras’s hand at his wrist, and Imani on his left side, standing very tall — she had coaxed her hair into a sort of Nefertiti wedge and studded it with estate sale pins she’d enchanted — and holding his hand. The interview, conducted directly afterwards in the Poveglia green room as Jack suffered a near panic attack of confused deja vu and nostalgia, went as had become customary: 

_WRW: So, what can you tell us about your new record?_

_Stubby: It’s called_ Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins _and it comes out 22 November. I could tell you all the boring stuff, like there’s twelve songs on it — ten of which me and Jackie wrote in his squalorous freezing flat on his Hammond organ, and the other two which the girls wrote backpacking in the Himalayas on thumb pianos or summat —_

_Jack: Or we could tell you it’s like the last days of the Roman empire._

_Stubby: The last gasp of debaucherous excess. The final orgiastic fist shook at the heavens. The creeping assumption of the waste land. You know we were going to call this band Corbenic, but [Jack] hated it._

_Jack: I told you someone would take it as a slight to our virility and you agreed._

_WRW: What should we look out for when the album comes out?_

_Stubby: Well the best song on it is the last one. “A Handful of Dust.” It’s like all of Jack’s blood and guts._

_Jack: Don’t flatter me._

_Stubby: It is! It’s ugly. Its ugliness is perhaps the most beautiful thing we’ve ever accomplished. It haunts all my dreams even the good ones._

_Jack: Well, it should…_

_WRW: The first time we ever heard of you four was when you played a three-month residency at Poveglia in 1985. How’s it feel to be back over five years later? And what can we expect this time?_

_Jack: It feels like — this deja vu is frankly suffocating. It would be easier maybe if [Stubby] weren’t wearing that bloody coat._

_Flora: They’ve painted the green room and it’s throwing me off._

_Imani: And it was summertime, and there was no AC. This time you can expect none of us to faint onstage._

_Jack: Hopefully._

_WRW: Your last public appearance was your catastrophic WPR set in January ’89 — how will you rebuild fans’ faith in your live set?_

_Jack: [laughs]_

_Stubby: By playing bloody good fucking live sets, obviously._

Indeed that night as they assumed the stage (the raucous, screaming, sweat-drenched crowd like something uncanny unbelonging in an otherwise familiar room) Jack felt a sort of obligation to prove himself the likes of which he had not felt since before their signing to Amortentia — perhaps since their last Poveglia shows. The sensation that they had to do it right, right now, or something very bad would happen, though that something bad was no longer Ras’s impending suicide. It didn’t do much to combat the overwhelming, mystifying deja vu, nor the floating buzz of the coke he’d done in the toilet just before they’d gone onstage, and anyway he missed the first chord on “The Golden Bough,” but not the second. 

A photograph from the show made the front page of the Arts & Culture section in that weekend’s _Prophet_. They had closed the gig with a very long “Western Road Empire,” a song so old from a world so changed it felt like a cold knife those days, and it was past midnight and unbreathably hot in the room despite the chill outside, and Jack at some juncture had broken the strap on his guitar so he crouched, pressing the headstock down against the floor by the body, muttering into the trembling strings assorted spells for feedback and distortion he wasn’t even sure were working over the ecstasy of noise. Ras, who obviously by this point had loosened one strap of his overalls and taken his shirt off to gleeful shrieking, had turned to Imani to quasi-coordinate a series of thunderous chords, and he stood on his tiptoes in his disintegrating leather boots, and Jack was holding his ankle, where he had cuffed up the overalls to show an inch or two of mismatched novelty socks purchased at the gift shop on Diagon Alley. _The Hobgoblins Return Triumphant,_ read the headline above the photograph, though the writer later went on to speculate in detail with regard to Jack’s health or lack thereof. Indeed not long after they finished the set and the two encores which were jubilantly requested the cold creeping darkness started closing in and Jack was obliged to Apparate immediately back to the Peckham flat for a dose. 

It was becoming more and more like — or at least he imagined, it was like being chained to the beach and feeling the tide come up starting at the soles of one’s feet. Like watching the sun sink against the wall knowing with unmemory but certainty that demons came seeping out of the floorboards when night fell. Like spreading black mold, a blight or a plague, a cloud of locusts. Like a rime of brittle and sheer black ice. He was certain if it came for him it would devour him completely beginning with the tattered garment that remained of his soul. Sometimes he thought he couldn’t see himself in the mirror. 

He had always had trouble remembering, even before the drugs increased in illegality and/or variety, exactly what happened when they were on stage. It was another piece of himself over whom the conscious one had little jurisdiction. But he remembered, maybe on the second weekend, they did an old one, “Highgate Cemetery,” and that old thread flowed through them both, like a snake eating itself, but it was oily black; he could almost see it. It was the stuff that bound them and the rope which would hang them both, in the end. Ras’s brow was tightly furrowed. Jack played the solo — it felt thick, like he was obliged to fight the sound forth from his guitar and from the amplifiers — leaning nearly all his weight against him, and then on his knees, and he pressed his cheek against Ras’s thigh. Cool denim. He closed his eyes against the burst of phosphorous flash from the press in the front row. Ras pushed the fretboard of his guitar against Jack’s back like a kind of exterior spine. Everything would be solved, Jack realized, with a lighting bolt of searing clarity, if only the two of them existed. 

In early November, inspired by Mitzi Love’s pronouncement that the only bad press was no press, Ras condescended to an interview in the Quibbler. Jack was supposed to have joined him for it but had passed out in the bathtub and woken up with a chill twenty minutes after the Portkey (owled to him by one of Lovegood’s proteges) disappeared unburdened from the coffee table. As a result Ras’s interview is rather unbound and salacious and certainly appropriate for the venue. Sales of the magazine grew exponentially until new readers realized interviews with magnetic, trainwreck-bound wizarding rock frontmen generally took a backseat to opinion pieces about the existence of nargles. W.R.W., _QQQ_ , and the Arts & Culture section of the _Prophet_ printed context-free quotes under ledes like _Stubby Gone Berserk!_ and _Hobgoblins Hunk: Headed for Horrorshow?_ (This was particularly surprising from W.R.W., who had published a very sympathetic eight-page story regarding Ras’s mental illness not two years previous, but it was not surprising from the _Prophet_ , whose Arts & Culture editor of the period was an ambitious recent Hogwarts grad named Rita Skeeter.) Anyway, the interview, or at least, the relevant portions, centered three major issues the Quibbler’s investigative journalist Naomi “Naz” Arthur-Zzyzx (later a reporter with WPR during the second war with Voldemort, killed by _Avada Kedavra_ in the Surrey Hills as she reported on the Battle of Westhumble) deemed relevant — sex, drugs, and Dark magic: 

_Naz: You guys sneak a lot of drug references into your songs._

_Stubby: Well the first time Jack and I ever hung out, we were staying up all night playing music together, and I’d never done so much coke in one sitting. Jack likes drugs more than me, I think, you know I can’t decide whether he’s completely fearless or terrified constantly. I think the things he doesn’t fear are things that would terrify most people and vice versa._

_Naz: What’s your favorite drug?_

_Stubby: Oh, it’s changed, you know, over the course of — there’s plenty I can’t do anymore, you know, bad experiences and whatnot, or now, you know, I’m 27, sometimes I feel old. Mostly these days I just smoke pot._

_Naz: Me too. I’m 32 now and I can’t drop acid anymore._

_Stubby: God, yes, I think that’s the first thing that goes, maybe. You close yourself off to the experience; it sounds hippie-ish, but I think it’s true._

_Naz: What’s Jack’s favorite drug?_

_Stubby: [ pause ] I don't know if he would say he has a favorite. I think he depends on drugs more than he even likes them._

_Naz: What does he depend on them for?_

_Stubby: [ longer pause ] I don’t want to put words in his mouth._

Later on, after a rousing discussion regarding Ras’s worst acid trip (in Helsinki on the _Erebus and Terror_ tour): 

_Naz: Something that got me about your guys’ band from the beginning was how queer it is, and some of the vibe of it, but in a way that’s not so much glam or camp or anything as it is — kind of gritty and raw. Which for me has been more truthful to the experience of being queer._

_Stubby: Queer as in —_

_Naz: As in gay._

_Stubby: Ah, well… I’ve never talked about this before in an interview._

_Naz: We don’t have to go there if —_

_Stubby: No, well, it’s important. None of this band is heterosexual._

[It was generally understood by this point that Imani and Flora were a couple, and the reason why Jack had been expelled from Hogwarts had been uncovered by Liz Grey and circulated among W.R.W. readers, much to his embarrassment. The true bombshell confession in his moment was Ras’s, whom no one had ever assumed to be anything other than straight, owing perhaps to his rather conventional handsomeness, good breeding, and a single (but widely circulated) concert photograph in which he is kissing a female fan on the lips (she had, he attested, grabbed his ears and pulled his face towards hers with magical might). He would not generally address this point again until an interview in W.R.W. shortly after the release of _In Felicitas,_ where he implied he was bisexual. He would even later, after the release of his second solo album _Xavia_ , tell a reporter that he was “completely uninterested in sex” in an interview with the _Prophet_ , and still later he would attest the whole thing had been a childish ruse and he wouldn’t discuss it further publicly — ed.] 

_Naz: And what does that mean to you?_

_Stubby: I think by default it makes us more interesting. So much of the alleged pain and misery in wizarding rock and roll is very white, very hetero and very pure-blood, you know; we have something different, we have pain and misery for all the fucked up pariah children of the wizarding world… And even — I shouldn’t tell you this. But if we were self-releasing music, or if the state of wizarding politics weren’t as it is, the music we’d be putting out would be different._

_Naz: How so different?_

_Stubby: More radical. In a lot of ways. Jack and I have the songs but there’s only so much we can do with them._

_Naz: What kinds of songs?_

_Stubby: [ laughs ] Our manager is already going to eviscerate me alive for this so I’m abstaining._

_Naz: What about — everyone asks you about your relationship with Jack._

_Stubby: I mean, I suppose I understand why they do; look at us. Really I think it’s over-analyzed._

_Naz: How do you mean?_

_Stubby: It just is, I don’t know, I always feel like asking people, haven’t you ever had a friend?_

_Naz: Not everyone gets so, you know, physical with their friends, or says things like —_

_Stubby: Well there you go over-analyzing it._

Finally, at the end of the three-hour conversation, by which point they were both clearly very stoned, they got around to the part about which, for some reason, Ras was most excoriated in the mainstream press: 

_Stubby: I think everyone of old wizarding blood has some fascination with Dark magic. Or at the very least with ancient magic which of course more often than not was Dark in its nature by today’s definition._

_Naz: Well, you’re pure-blood from a very old family; are you fascinated too?_

_Stubby: Of course, of course I am; I met Jack actually in this Arthurian mythology class, which I was taking because I was obsessed with the grail legend and with Merlin and Morgana and their tombs and the ley lines and all of it. The short of it is that Dark magic in theory and practice is for pure-blooded wizards and as such it reminds us of a time when magic was for us alone. That’s why I think it’s difficult for pure-blooded wizards to denounce Dark magic or refuse to come out against it. We can try to be as open-minded and generous and accepting as we can pretend, but down deep there’s this sense of entitlement. I’ve been thinking of it like a sort of velvet mantle which is very heavy and very difficult to throw off._

_Naz: I didn’t think you would want to talk about it, but I wanted to ask about the Boardman seats on the Wizengamot._

_Stubby: My sister is going to take one when she finishes law school this year. Actually I was supposed to take the seat, but then I quit school, and anyway I would’ve been shit at it, because I’m a coward._

_Naz: You don’t seem very cowardly to me._

_Stubby: You say that now but I’m a rock singer. I don’t have to take any kind of public stance if I don’t want to._

_Naz: But will you?_

_Stubby: I think I will. Some days I know I will and other days I’m not sure. It comes down to fear. Which in the end is most of what the record’s about._

_Naz: I thought so — I’ve seen the tracklist, and there’s —_

_Stubby: “I can show you fear in a handful of dust,” yeah. And, there’s this song Jack is obsessed with, which is actually the first song he ever played for me. “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend” by John Cale._

_Naz: I’ve never heard it._

_Stubby: It’s best when Jack sings it I think or perhaps I’m biased. But it’s influenced in its own way — I think since I first heard it, with him playing it in my living room in 1983 — everything we’ve done together._

_Naz: What do you think you’re most afraid of?_

_Stubby: [ pause ] Isn’t it obvious?_

Though he initially refused to, Ras was later forced to give a statement to the _Prophet_ saying he had been remiss to imply that any and all pure-blooded wizards including himself were one step from succumbing to their entitlement and embracing Dark magic. Most of the statement was in fact written by Mitzi Love, but Ras signed off on it and afterward seemed withdrawn for days. Jack thought amidst the maelstrom of fear and confusion that he felt a little sorry for Ras, but logically he understood he should be angry, and anyway he never read the full interview, which had taken up a full ten pages of the _Quibbler_ in the small-print style of the American Muggle punk magazine _Maximum Rocknroll_. “This is your Lennon moment,” he told Ras backstage at Poveglia. The good thing about the interview controversy and the rapidly surmounting rumors of drug abuse and inevitable trainwreck was that ticket sales for the residency were booming. The man in the red suit had brought them a bottle of Bordeaux from one of the great wizarding vineyards of Saint-Sauveur, dating back to the 1890s. “At least you didn’t say we’re bigger than Merlin.” 

Ras laughed a kind of sharp hurt sound. 

“What’re you worried about,” Flora said, kicking his chair. “It was brilliant if I do say so. We’re going to sell a sick amount of records.” 

Ras’s brow furrowed and he looked away. Do you want to talk to me about it, Jack wanted desperately to say. Let’s talk about it. Let’s put words to your fear together because I can sense, now, at last, at long last, that our fear is not dissimilar. But as always he couldn’t speak it. 

\--

Amortentia released _Decline and Fall of the Hobgoblins_ on 22 November 1990, a dark and brooding Thursday; that morning when Jack woke up on the couch it was snowing, and he watched the flakes spiraling in the window for a while with a kind of diffuse pastoral joy until the black mold feeling started creeping along the floor. The record jumped quickly to the top of the wizarding charts, breaking a record set three years previous by the Weird Sisters’ _Lethifolding_ for first-week sales of a wizarding rock record. It knocked the new Best-Of box set from the Occlumen from the number-one position and even beat Celestina Warbeck, who had released a Christmas album at the beginning of November. Photographs of the band (older shots provided by Amortentia) graced the cover of that weekend’s W.R.W. and the Arts & Culture section of the _Prophet_ , though both attendant articles included reviews of the record and the band’s Poveglia residency rather than interviews, as Ras had refused to do any and the rest of the band didn’t care enough to do their own or convince him otherwise. 

Most press about the record centered “A Handful of Dust” and “Gravesend Rag” as the band’s most formidable achievements, and most concluded that the album was good enough — even, great enough — to outshine the growing controversy and voyeuristic attention. “Of course it’s a punk rock LP,” wrote Lochland Schneehauser at the _Prophet;_ he was about sixty years old and usually reviewed art gallery openings and classical concertos, but God, he had good taste, “but it’s also a profound statement of what it means — how it feels — to be a young wizard or witch today. It’s a document capturing a moment in history both personal and public. It’s a generational expression of fear and frustration; it’s _Let it Bleed_ for Wizarding London 1990.” Of course, Amortentia chose that last bit as the pull quote to sticker on the cover of the second pressing. 

The night of 22 November would be the final show of their residency at Poveglia. Then they planned to spend December letting the record snowball buzz (and letting their fans learn all the lyrics) and rehearsing a new set at the underground bunker in Chalk Farm. January and February they would tour around the United Kingdom, and plans were in motion for a European tour in March and April followed by a tour of America and Canada in the summer. Of course the latter two would never happen, and they later learned Mitzi Love must have had some inkling of this, as she had put in requests but hadn’t officially booked any shows beyond the UK tour. The album release show was sold out, and the band arrived early to unroll and hang a banner bearing a blown-up rendition of the album cover, which had been printed by Imani’s brother Olu. It was a photograph Jack had taken on their last rounds in support of _Erebus and Terror,_ featuring Ras, Imani, and Flora on the grounds of Dinas Bran in reference to Corbenic and the waste land and the famous images of the Rolling Stones at Swarkstone Hall and the Cramps in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. He had developed the photograph whilst very high and had drawn and written on it subsequently with oily black quill ink, and Ras had found it as such in the Peckham flat during the March ’89 writing sessions and had seen something in it Jack still didn’t quite understand. 

Up to this point, Jack had refrained from taking the vials of unicorn blood or the carven-bone syringe or any of his works with him to Poveglia, because he was paranoid about being caught or having it stolen (after all he was paying Rorschach an arm and a leg to supply it for him), and because it was so easy to Apparate home and take a dose at the end of the set. But as they were obliged to show up early to hang the banner and sign records for a select group of raffle-winning fans (Amortentia had set up a competition for the first 100 buyers) he had brought it all in a handsome leather film bag repurposed for this use and magically concealed in the inside pocket of his coat. 

Later, from Byberry, he would think about all the threads of history that had necessitated weaving together in order to actualize the full tapestry of what had happened. It was before Ras had brought him the guitar (he would later learn Ras was still in St. Kelly’s) and he was still recovering from the withdrawal alone in the small white room which seemed very bright. He spent much of every day sleeping or thinking, and he wrote down every dream he had, and he wrote down memories when he could surface them from the murk, and some lyrics and some fragments of poetry, and letters to Ras and Imani and Flora he would never send and in fact most of which he would later burn. That he had brought his works with him to Poveglia that night seemed a sort of lynchpin. The joint in the arching winged loop of the chaos theory. If he had Apparated home either it would have gone as was completely normal or he would have died alone and Rorschach would have discovered his corpse and likely dumped it in the Thames. Instead from the causal alternative the next three months (the Season in Hell, he would later call it) would take a very particular course. 

They played that night the entire record but for “Gravesend Rag” (the Hobgoblins would never play it live, but Saint Rose would a few times on the tour following the release of _Severe Asceticism_ ), and they closed their set with “A Handful of Dust,” which they had spent the previous week rehearsing. As Ras started to play the intro and the crowd erupted Jack realized he had never been so terrified to sing a song in public before, even through the lingering numb haze of the drug. This one seemed a confession of something he could not yet even admit to himself. And Ras was watching him with something like love, or pride, or certainty. 

_What to make of all this fear you left in me?  
_ _Like will you leave me darling when the war comes…_

In the front row all the stretching and sallow sweaty mask-like faces contorted in their singing along. He felt Ras lean against him, his warmth like a balm, and the smell of the house and of smoke in his hair, as though there were no wound where he had torn away… 

_I can show you the garden gate gone all to rust  
_ _I can show you fear in a handful of dust_

He knew certainly if he took his hands from his guitar they would be shaking. Something was wringing up through his chest like a hangover pressing at his throat. He closed his eyes. 

_I can show you fear in a handful of dust  
_ _I can show you fear in a handful of dust_

W.R.W. would mention the show, and particularly this moment, in a sidebar article the following week: “The Hobgoblins closed their triumphant set with an explosive live debut of _Decline and Fall_ highlight ‘A Handful of Dust,’ though Jack sang the whole thing with his eyes closed.” 

This was not entirely true because he opened his eyes toward the end in order to sing the refrain with Ras, _do you know what you’ve done to me, I can’t tell what I’ve done to you_ , and found he almost could not see him through the fallen grey-black veil of the darkness. Ras’s brow tightened in concern and he dropped his hand from his fretboard to take Jack’s wrist. The flashbulb burst smeared the dark like an oil stain. 

Later he would not be certain entirely what he was thinking. He thought they played the song to the end but could not be certain. He left the stage (the crowd’s shouting sounded like tinnitus ringing his ears) and went back to his dressing room and closed the door. The thick manifest darkness was wrapped around him lethifoldish and velvety and his heart was slamming its cage of ribs. He took his bag from the inside pocket of his coat and laid all the works out upon the vanity. He scarcely remembered measuring the dose but he remembered looking at himself in the mirror. He had rolled up the sleeve of his shirt past the crook of his elbow where the spreading silvery bruise seemed black in the light and the old scars were like itched-open mosquito bites. His eyes were wet and cold and bright and for a moment — it was the creeping darkness — he thought he could watch himself dissolving. 

He licked his thumb and rubbed the vein out. Shouting in the other room. Lined up the needle with the fine blue tube of it and pressed the plunger. Near instantaneously he knew it was too much. It rushed at him like an oncoming train screaming out of the tunnel blinding with floodlights. Blood — silver red black red black blood tracing tickling down down warm as rain into his palm. Too much, too much. He had seconds he knew until it hit him and he thought perhaps he should attempt some kind of communication, like a call for help, or a note… Instead, too quick, shattering, it struck him and drug him under itself, and it was heavy and hot, sparking, blinding white, a sterile chromatic room, a raw nothing, in which nothing moved, in which nothing was. 

\--

At Hogwarts, Flora St. James, Ravenclaw alumna, unholy stoner, preternaturally assured lesbian with a taste for psychedelic experiences, had been a rather unexpected potions whiz. In fact, directly out of school and indeed for the band’s first few unsuccessful years, she had been aggressively headhunted by Fidelity & Daughters, the potions magnate responsible for Sugarman’s Sleeping Draughts, _Finite!_ Hangover Helpers, Miss Montgomery’s Magical Mop-It-All, and several potions intended for use in the bedroom. They had recently lost face in a love potion controversy and were determined to regain their industry clout by developing brilliant new brews and as such sought to hire young witches and wizards with fresh ideas. Flora, one of only four Hogwarts students in her graduating class to receive an Outstanding on the Potions N.E.W.T., was a clear candidate. Instead she decided to go to MGC to pursue a degree in her other Hogwarts specialty, Witch Studies. She had not, however, forfeited entirely her skill with a cauldron, because as soon as she began to suspect Jack was taking unicorn blood she had invented a potion in her and Imani’s bathtub in their flat in Camden Town which would reverse an overdose if taken immediately. She carried a dose of it with her in a nondescript flask whenever the band played shows. It was tucked in the front pocket of the soft gig case in which she carried her bass. Imani knew about it, and she knew its location; Ras and Jack both had no idea it so much as existed, and it was unlikely either of them knew Flora was in any way skilled at potion-brewing. 

As such when she went in the dressing room to check on Jack perhaps two or three minutes after the fact he was on the floor before the mirror and not breathing. She closed and locked the door and dug the flask out from the pocket of her bag and with magic she sat him up against the wall. His eyes were not quite closed and there was a little saliva in the corner of his mouth tracing over his cheek and his arm was bleeding thick but sluggish where he’d torn his skin open in his haste. 

She administered the potion and then she pointed her wand at his chest (her hand was shaking) and said, “ _Enervate_.” 

\--

Someone pulled him out of it by the scruff of the neck and he breathed a great choking sobbing coughing breath. In the struggling blur of life it was a blonde-haired someone with him in the tiny dark room who smelled like sweat and tea and whiskey and whose trembly terrified breathing he could hear symphonic echoing or perhaps it was his own. “Listen up,” said this person, “you fuck.” It was Flora. She had clamped her pale hand over the place in his arm that was bleeding and her other hand took his and pressed it forward. Her rings — the blinding shatter-bright spark of her rings in the light. And there was a hickey on her neck just an old red scraping bite inside her collar with the freckles and ink marks she had attempted — he could not remember what, anymore. “What is your fucking damage,” she said; her voice was trembling too tightly to yell, but she wanted to. “What the bloody fuck is wrong with you?” 

Sense was swimming out of it. He understood what he’d done — and she had had something — 

“It’d kill him, if you died, do you know that? Everytime you do this you’re killing him.” 

He’s killing me, he might’ve said. Everything he does is killing me. 

“I can’t bloody well take the both of you anymore. You know every morning I wake up and think, why in Morgana’s name did we quit Draught of Living Death.” She unfolded his arm and Vanished the blood. The wound still bled though less so than before and as such she unfolded Jack’s sleeve down and pressed the thick fold of fabric against it. “I could tell, Jack, how this was going to be, the fucking minute we met, do you remember that?” 

He thought perhaps he nodded but couldn’t quite tell. 

“Why are you killing yourself? Can you tell me?” 

She was trying to be upset, but she was crying. It dawned on him that if she hadn’t cared for him he would be dead. “I think,” he tried, and his voice sounded far away, echoing, from another room, “I think, Flora, I think you know.” 

“I bloody know,” she said. She punched his shoulder hard. He thought he was talking about the almost-sharedness of their imperfect blood and yet perhaps there was something else in it. “Of course I bloody fucking know; how does this solve it? How does this solve anything?” 

It doesn’t, he didn’t say; of course it doesn’t, it can’t be solved, not by me. His head was beginning to hurt and so he closed his eyes fearing if he opened them the darkness would be pressing inwardly again in the corners of his vision. 

“I’m going to take you home,” Flora said, wearily. She pressed her warm open palm against the place where she’d hit him. “I’m going to side-along you. Are you ready?” 

He nodded, but somewhere in the mix of it he passed out again. He dreamed he and Flora were walking together in the desert, then Flora turned into Ras and then Ras turned into Rorschach, who pressed his forehead against Jack’s neck and shoulder the way Ras did sometimes onstage, but then he took a bite out of it. 

\--

Jack woke up in his bed to a sound from the street. By the light in the window it was the afternoon, and it had been raining. His mouth tasted like sand and charcoal. On the bedside table Flora had left a cup of coffee under the pale glow of a warming charm and a glass of midnight blue potion and a note: 

_Drink the potion (ALL of it) before you have the coffee. And then for the love of god eat something. If you need to have a dose it should be fine after eleven. I’m sorry for all I said but you scared the ever living fuck out of me. Owl me when you wake up._

Beneath the writing she had drawn a sloppy crooked heart. He sat, weakly, shaking. The room was spinning and very cold, and the big silver-dark bruise inside his elbow had spread like a thundercloud encompassing the scabby wound from the night previous. He drank the potion — all of it — and it tasted like charcoal, a bit of dittany for healing, lavender for calm, and moly against enchantment, which was why it was midnight blue. He wondered if Flora had brought him around with a drought of the same and where she had learned the recipe. 

The sound he'd thought was from the street came again but closer-seeming now, and he realized it was coming from the front room. Still it took him maybe five minutes to get to his feet and find his wand, wrapping himself in the wool throw blanket, and stumble, half-leaning against the wall, down the hallway to the front room, where Rorschach was milling about floating very many things that didn’t belong to him into a handsome and monogrammed leather duffel bag. 

“What’re you doing,” said Jack, but he had to try twice with his voice before it worked. Several of the floating objects fell to the floor when Rorschach’s attention strayed from them, and when Rorschach looked up at him Jack belatedly realized his face was wrong. There appeared to be a golf ball under one of his eyelids, and the opposite brow was split open and bruising and bleeding against his cheek. His lip was burst purple and swollen, and his nose blackening crooked, and around his neck was a throttling ring from a _Strangulari_ hex or someone’s bare hands. His knuckles were broken too, like pomegranate flesh, and his hands were shaking. Blood spattered his well-made jeans and white shirt and the lapels of his wool coat. “What happened to you?” 

“What do you think?” asked Rorschach. There was a bright cloud of blood in the visible eye which made the green of it seem thick and dense as a summer forest. “I could ask you the same.” 

He wondered what he looked like, but he was afraid to look in the mirror. Certainly like death. “I OD’d.” 

“Yes,” Rorschach said. He looked into the duffel bag. He seemed to be evaluating which of Jack’s things he could successfully make off with before Jack’s eyes. “He may’ve mentioned that.” 

“Who may’ve — ”

The broken brow twisted sardonically. “Has it really addled your brains so much.” 

“Who,” Jack said, needing to hear it, though he thought he knew. “Davy.” 

“Your fucking — your boyfriend.” And he put on a grotesque and simpering campy lisp and limp wrist. “The bloody mirror of your soul.” 

There was a heavy rime of grey in the corner of Jack’s vision. A creeping shadow. Perhaps it was just the anger. “It isn’t like that — ” 

Rorschach fixed him with the bloody eye and the palimpsest of the other. So he stopped. 

“I won’t do this anymore,” Rorschach said. “He has a mind to turn me in.” 

“You won’t — ”

“I can’t see you anymore, do you get it, like at all. I can’t sell you anything anymore.” Jack felt a bolt; the jagged edge of it was fear. Perhaps he had suspected this was coming. You could not, whispered some battered figment of his rationality, have expected you could go on pretending forever. “You do know both bloody Boardmans currently on the Wizengamot have had several of their political opponents killed,” Rorschach said. An unfamiliar note of hysteria had crept into his voice. 

“He’s not going to have you _killed_.” 

“Well he fucking said he would, Jack, if I went near you again, and I’m here now, so…” 

“Well where am I supposed to get it now?” 

“Fuck if I know.” And he spat a sort of rosary of blood on the ash-greasy hardwood floor, stained with shadow. “I’m leaving,” he said. 

“No,” Jack said, not particularly knowing why. “You can’t — ” 

“You’ll find I absolutely can and will. It’s been fun Jackie but getting beaten by your jealous lover is a bit of a dealbreaker for me…” 

“You can’t leave with all my fucking things,” Jack said. He was trying for venom but it was a little hollow. “Leave that bag and get out and I won’t hex you.” 

“You couldn’t hex a fucking fly in your condition,” said Rorschach, laughing, but then Jack hexed him. It was the same Bat Bogey hex he had leveled upon the professor. Casting it took an amount of focus and effort that was almost literally painful. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d tried any aggressive magic. The little creatures manifest a vortex of furry velvet darkness tugging like a reverse upward maelstrom at Rorschach’s hair and clothes; he shrieked and dropped the bag and covered his face with his forearms, but one of the bats was already investigating his nose. 

“Tell me where I can get more stuff and I’ll lift it,” said Jack, as loudly as he could manage over the symphony of investigative chirping. Keeping his wand trained on Rorschach and the bats he approached and pulled the bag out from the fray with his foot. 

“Fuck you,” Rorschach cried, waving his arms around comically to positively no avail. “You’re a bloody waster and a lousy fucking lay Childermass and I hope next time — ” 

Whatever he hoped was quickly silenced because several of the bats had discovered his mouth. Jack drove the whole clambering mess toward the door with magic, shoved Rorschach bodily into the hall, lifted the hex, and slammed and locked the door again. He had just enough strength left to gently sit against it rather than collapsing to the floor. 

From the hall, muffled: “Half the contents of that bag _do_ belong to me — ” 

“Fuck you. Go away.” 

“You ungrateful shit. Where would you be without me I do wonder.” 

Jack burst out laughing at that and found he couldn’t stop. He laughed and laughed, and the shadow moved across the floor. The laughter was like some heavy breath thing floating out of him, wobbly and quicksilver, and eventually it hardly made sense anymore; it was just a sound, and then it was hardly a sound, it was just a shaking. Eventually he heard Rorschach’s boots clunk downstairs and the front door slamming shut. He wiped his face and discovered he had been crying. Outside it had begun to snow a wash of pale flurry-flakes that would not stick. He got up and braced himself against the door for a while until the room stopped spinning, and then he went to his bedroom and got dressed. The things he had worn to the show the night previous would have to be burned because they were so bloodstained and not all the blood was his (he had read stories in the _Prophet_ about addicts being sentenced to Azkaban for two drops of unicorn blood on their clothing). 

Thankfully, Jack found Flora had put his works in the Disillusioned pocket of his coat she had helpfully discovered. There was enough left in the vial for perhaps three more doses — a single day’s worth — and then he had positively no inkling of where to refresh his supply. He could hear his own breath tightening-twisting in fear. To attempt to find a new dealer would be almost suicidal in its insanity. And yet so would quitting. The Hobgoblins were contractually obligated to go on tour in January; if Jack died or went insane in withdrawal the rest would have to do it without him. The thought made something curdle in his stomach — Ras singing alone. Or with someone else. 

He imagined what must have happened the night previous. Flora had brought him back to the flat and put him in bed. Probably with a great reluctance and tragic sense of realism she had put the little leather film bag back in his jacket pocket; she had made coffee and poured a dose of the potion into one of his filthy fingerprinted crystal goblets, and she had Apparated back to Poveglia, where it was likely Imani had been either consoling or distracting Ras depending on how much he had inferred of the situation. She had told him what happened and somehow he had hunted down Rorschach, which probably had been undifficult, as Rorschach usually hung out at one of four Knockturn Alley clubs selling all sorts of contraband and attempting to get himself invited to various occultist and Dark goings-on. Either Imani and Flora had been unable to restrain him from this mission or they had tacitly co-signed it or they had gone back home in attempt to disengage. And Ras had found Rorschach and likely lured him outside against being challenged by his entourage and proceeded to pummel his face in a sort of long-deferred attempt at retribution or vengeance. Or in attempt to get Jack to quit without actually taking any responsibility on for himself. Or in attempt to otherwise remove from Jack’s life any semblance of another crutch. 

It was difficult to stand on his two feet for very long and the darkness wasn’t far off (he could hear it, almost, like a headache, a dull sub-bass drone) but he went to the Floo and cast in the last dregs of greenish powder and stepped in. “Front Room, 60 Western,” he said, voice fragile, “Fortis Green.” 

Ras was sitting in one of the two floral armchairs listening to Fugazi with a cup of tea. His knuckles were bruised and his lip was split and swollen, and there was a Muggle ice pack resting on his knee. He looked hunted-ish at the sight of Jack but otherwise not much the worse for wear, and Jack banged his head getting out of the Floo, disoriented and suddenly nauseous, and stumbled to keep from falling. “What are you — ” Ras started saying, then he stopped. He had got up and was hovering close and he smelled like blood but he wouldn’t touch Jack. “Sit,” he said. “Do you want some — ”

“I don’t want bloody anything. I need to — ”

He did have to sit, lest he collapse, so he sat on the ottoman. On the turntable was his and Ras’s favorite Fugazi song, “Give Me the Cure.” “I never thought too hard on dying before…” He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. 

“You shouldn’t be out,” Ras said, carefully. Like to one of the wolves set loose from the enclosure in Regent’s Park. “You should go upstairs and lie down. I’ll bring you up some chocolate.” His clammy scabby hand squeezed Jack’s knee where the denim of his jeans was ripped; the knuckles were swollen violet red and torn, spiderwebbing black. A blur of impressionist color. Jack pulled away and Ras left it. “How much do you have left,” he said, even more carefully. 

“Three doses.” 

“Ah.” 

Jack took his hands from his eyes and rubbed his mouth. Ras was watching him with the wide nervous eyes (the left one drifting as ever) and for the life of him he couldn’t think of what to say. He had planned it all in his bedroom but now it was elusive. Do what he says, said that bruised and fragile piece of his brain. Do what he says and go upstairs and lie down and have some chocolate and it will be all better. 

Ras leant toward him again. “Jack — ”

It snapped, then. “Must you take every bloody thing from me?” 

Silence, but for the song, which also had burst, like an overripe fruit. 

“Every bloody thing,” Jack went on, into the stillness, and Ras’s vivid shocked eyes, which he couldn’t look at. “And then everything I had to get to replace those first things. On and on and on and soon there’ll be nothing left.” 

“ _I_ ’ve taken everything from _you_?” 

“Don’t you dare go twisting — ” 

“You nearly fucking died last night. You _were_ technically dead briefly or so Flora said. Do you know — do you entertain a single inkling about how much your life means to how many people?” 

“I don’t care how much — ”

“Liar. You bloody liar.” 

“Well what is it worth to you?” 

“What?” 

“What is my life worth to you?” 

“You’re my best — my only fucking friend,” Ras said. “It’s worth everything to me.” 

“You’ve a funny way of bloody telling it but not showing it.” 

“Not showing — ”

“You think leaving me high and dry like this on bloody everything is how to tell me you — and everything you’ve told Liz fucking Grey…” 

Ras stood up and went to the turntable and lifted the needle. In the silence someone on the street was laughing. 

“Maybe if you tell me what I bloody did to make you do all this — ” 

“Maybe if you didn’t assume every fucking thing I do is because of you.” 

Isn’t it, said the tiny voice. 

“What happened,” Ras said. He was looking out the window into the overgrown front lawn because, Jack realized belatedly, he was on the verge of crying. “What fucking happened to you.” 

“Whatever happened to me. It’s what’s always fucking happened to me but you’ve never seen it. You _can’t_ see it. It breaks my bloody heart. But you can’t see it.” 

Ras had covered his eyes with his hand. “I’m so— ”

“Don’t tell me you’re bloody sorry. You can’t be sorry. You don’t even know what you’re sorry for.” 

He stood up, stumbled a little. The room (that room) shrinking, pressing, until he couldn’t breathe through the nostalgia. Ras was looking at him like one might look at some wounded majestic animal — with a deep remorse and an ineluctable understanding of the inevitable. In the pale dark day his eyes were wet and bright and Jack loved him, hated him, like dying, like a hole in the head. “Where are you going,” he said. 

“I have to find a new fucking dealer before tomorrow morning,” Jack told him, stepping toward the Floo. “Thank you for that.” 

“Don’t,” Ras said, broken-sounding. Flat unsound — no echo, stillness, in the tiny room, and the curtains drawn over the windows. Like something he was obligated to say contractually. “Please.” But he didn’t mean it. 


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> all the music in these last two chapters is linked [HERE](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/post/153986537450/i-just-posted-the-last-two-chapters-of-a-handful).

VII. 

On January 19, 1991, the Hobgoblins kicked off the monthlong U.K. tour which would be their last with a show at Dyatlov & Roswell. Evvy Mitchell had booked the bill, which also included Crushing Valerian and a new punk band called Moorfolk, before she had been forced to flee London to an undisclosed location following death threats from a blood purist contingent unknown who objected to a Muggle-born witch’s owning property on Knockturn Alley. The gig as such was overseen by her associate and the club’s co-owner, Croydon Crag, who was nearly seven feet tall, always vaguely sweaty, and hardly spoke. He seemed rather harried as the band loaded in that afternoon, as Evvy usually dealt with all the public-facing matters of ownership of the establishment and he was customarily left to the dark back room to do the books. “Sold out,” was all he told the Hobgoblins before heading out front to haggle with the witch who delivered assorted pickled oddities for the bar’s more expensive cocktails. “I’ve a celebratory joint for you in the back room.” 

In fact the entire tour was sold out, which Ras had learned from Mitzi Love when she Floo’d him at Fortis Green that morning. He had owled Imani and Flora and Jack with the news, and though the girls stopped by the wine shop in Diagon Alley on the way to pick up a good bottle of champagne to celebrate, Jack hadn’t yet heard, because he didn’t remember the last time he’d been back to the Peckham flat. He hadn’t spoken to Ras — and he had ignored all of Ras’s Floos and owls — since the day following the album release show, and he had spent much of his time just around the corner from Dyatlov & Roswell at a private club called the Wells, where the new dealer he had miraculously found after Rorschach left him tended bar. She was renowned for the cocktails she’d make with the juice of pickled dragon eyes, a hearty dose of hallucinogenic wizarding absinthe poured over a block of black sugar, and a viscous red liquid administered from a vial with an eyedropper, which she swore was real werewolf blood. She was always trying to press one on Jack (she called it a Midnight Rambler) but he always passed, recalling Lupin and El with a guilty nausea muted by the drug. 

As such by the time Jack arrived at Dyatlov & Roswell the night of the tour kickoff show Moorfolk was already halfway through their set, Imani and Flora had long since gone by Jack’s flat themselves to pick up his guitar, and Ras had locked himself in his dressing room. This in many ways exemplified how the complete tour would proceed. Flora brought Jack the setlist and a bit of champagne in a paper cup, and for maybe five minutes she tried to small talk with him, then she left again. He sat back in the chair and looked at himself in the mirror. He thought about going by Imani and Flora’s dressing room and asking them to do his makeup but it seemed like a great deal of effort. He took his guitar out and tuned it and played a few chords, and then he played the Stones’ “Play With Fire.” He wished he had stayed for another drink at the Wells. He closed his eyes. 

If he had fallen asleep he woke up with someone drumming on the door; it was Imani, with her sticks. In those days everyone looked at him with a deep and suffocating sadness. Together the two of them walked to the wings in a nightmarish deja vu, and they watched at the stage as whoever was doing lights faded out the house. The crowd started screaming as though someone had yelled “Fire!” and Jack saw Ras and Flora were in the other wing having what appeared to be a mild whispered argument. He remembered he had not seen Ras in two months. Imani squeezed his wrist and he kissed her cheek. She went on stage and the screaming intensified. Flora did, and it rose still another octave. Feeling suddenly petrified, Jack watched the two of them casting the necessary spells on their instruments to amplify the sound enough to fill the hall, and Flora watched him back with her eyebrows cocked in a kind of vicious obligation. 

_As soon as we play the first chord I’ll black out_ , Jack thought; _I always do_. 

He took a heavy dragging step and then another and so did Ras. The crowd and the static hum of the amplifiers like two warring monoliths of atmospheric noise. The floor seemed to vibrate. He cast the amplification spells on his guitar and pressed his fingernails between the strings and dragged slowly upward. Ras, unslept and unshaven, half-wild, dressed in filthy once-white jeans and a shirt which might be called a doublet, paced barefoot, striking evil-sounding chords with a violent rapidity. Then Imani rolled the clattering driving drums that started “It’s Feast Day in Hell.” Ras’s eyes met Jack’s with the sharp severing trauma of a guillotine, and then everything slipped away. 

\--

It went on as such. Against all odds the shows were well-reviewed, but with a kind of nihilistic bent Jack might’ve noticed if he had had somewhat more of his faculties about him. A zine in Brighton said of their gig there, cut short due to a setlist miscommunication which nearly inspired a fistfight between Jack and Ras, “It was like watching any number of great artists at the tail end of their rope, in the elastic breathless moment just before the noose tightens — probably like watching Van Gogh paint at Saint-Remy.” (It is likely that “Saint-Remy,” the lead single from Ras’s 1993 record _In Felicitas_ , was inspired by this review; the song’s chorus goes, _throw me a rope, I’m out at sea / painting like Vincent in Saint-Remy_.) 

The royalty checks they received from Amortentia on the sales of _Decline and Fall_ were substantial enough that Jack had been able to purchase a month’s supply of unicorn blood from the bartender at the Wells, and Ras had returned with zero apparent gusto to the class of cocaine habit he had had at MGC; in the uncomfortably close quarters of touring life he consented to share, though Jack would do a bump and then leave him alone again. They played along the south coast and up through Wales, where Jack, in Cardiff, burst into tears when a fan showed him her tattoo of a lyric from “The Heat Death of the Universe,” the closing track on _Erebus and Terror,_ which he had written about Ras’s long-ago dream that they’d walked into the sun together. With her hand trembling she gave him a crusty embroidered handkerchief out of her coat pocket. He blew his nose explosively then tried to laugh it off but she was onto him. Her accent was near incomprehensible but she said she had driven from Cilycwm and she was a poet and she also had a Crushing Valerian tattoo, which she had done herself on her ankle. Jack went inside and talked the rest of the band into playing “The Heat Death of the Universe” that night, and before their set made certain to get high enough as to not start weeping again as they played it, singing together, in the screaming sweating room, very close and very far: 

_You and me_  
_Can’t it be  
_ _Spontaneous entropy_

They played a house show in Holyhead with C.V., and then they took the ferry to Ireland, where they played Dublin, Cork, Galway, and Derry; they drove to Belfast and took another ferry to the Isle of Man, where they played an afternoon show in a beer hall as hail beat a shattering percussive rhythm on the glass roof which nearly drowned out the well of sound from their amplifiers. That night they took another ferry back to Liverpool and played there, then in Manchester, where Ketterslee came to the gig bearing expensive wines purchased on Amortentia’s dime; the next morning, dearly hungover, they drove the M6 up through the rainblown north country toward Scotland listening to Big Black in the van and not speaking. 

In Glasgow they had been booked for a photoshoot with Dani Macdougal, a wizarding photographer of growing renown who usually worked freelance for the Culture pages of _Edinburgh Wizarding Review_ , but they were late due to van issues on the M74 and as such she agreed to take photographs as they performed. She was monumentally talented (another _was:_ a Muggle-born witch, she was killed in 1996 in Dumfries, with her camera in her hands, covering the war on assignment for the _Review_ ) and captured some of the most iconic later photographs of the band, eventually used in all the CD reissues, retrospective zines, unauthorized biographies, bootleg t-shirts, vinyl box sets, et cetera. She captured indelible moments and expressions and looks: beads of moisture in Imani’s hair, the glint of light like a spark of magic off her drum kit; Flora’s fearless confrontational glare, as though she dared the entire audience to fuck with her; Ras’s face over Jack’s shoulder, open and yearning, searching, desperate; Jack crouched on the floor at the end of their set, in the tidal wash-out of “A Handful of Dust,” scraping a broken string against the pickup of his guitar, brow furrowed, blood under the fingernails, bones in his wrists vivid and sharp and stretched across them the ancient black scarring of his _in the garden_ tattoo. Ras had surprised them all with the song; they had planned to close with “The Heat Death of the Universe,” but both songs began with his guitar introduction and they couldn’t very well stop playing “A Handful of Dust” after the crowd recognized it and started screaming. Afterward they didn’t speak about it. The photographs were published in the _Review_ with simple captions denoting the band members’ names and information about Dani’s camera equipment and developing spells. Amortentia later purchased the rights to the images and haggled fiercely with Dani’s estate over their right to include them in a retrospective photo book after her passing, until Ras and the Boardman lawyers intervened. 

Since Jack’s reliance on unicorn blood had reached a certain threshold of direness all the Hobgoblins’ tours had seemed to him evidence that there was some dissolution in process larger even than what he’d imagined. They drove in the country unspeaking listening to tapes eating takeaway and smoking cigarettes until the still air in the van was unbreathable and they had to roll all the windows down to let the frigid February air in, and Jack pressed his face to the cold glass and thought of Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” like a song stuck in his head, _things fall apart, the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world_ , and eventually he could feel rhythm in it and he hummed to himself or tapped his foot until the darkness chased it all away and he was obliged to cast what he thought was a covert Disillusionment charm on himself in order to take a dose. 

They drove on the cold and featureless heath into the highlands through the pale wash of snow white-knuckled on the wheel; they played Inverness and Aberdeen and drove south again to St. Andrews and Edinburgh. The cold was possessing. Jack snatched dreams and recalled when very dearly high imaginations or memories of playing with Ras onstage. Nowhere else would they so much as speak to each other but when they performed Ras would lean on him, his entire weight, and Jack would close his eyes and remember playing shows in the kitchen at Fortis Green, like a previous lifetime. 

\--

After Edinburgh they were scheduled to play Newcastle, Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, and another show at Dyatlov & Roswell. Evvy still had not returned to London but when they arrived at the Newcastle venue a typically blunt owl from Croydon Crag was waiting for them: _Have secured bloody savage openers. See you Friday — CC // D &R_

For the first time Jack food himself longing to be home desperately in the cold Peckham flat with the Hammond organ because he had a feeling like he needed to write songs. Perhaps, he thought, he would feel better if he wrote songs. Sometimes before they played he sat in his dressing room alone and wrote a little on the guitar but usually it ended up winding back around into _things fall apart, the center cannot hold_ … he was obliged to stop and have a cigarette and attempt to collect himself. This song would be completed in Byberry Prison and released on his 1995 solo album as the nine-minute “Slouching Towards Bethlehem _,_ ” but at the time it seemed to torture him, like tinnitus or a nightmare. 

On the drive into Leeds Imani turned off the tape player and switched to the Muggle radio in attempt to pick up a traffic report, but they had set the dial to WPR a few days previous and tuned into a breaking news segment about a Muggle-born wizarding club in Bournemouth whose meeting place, which they shared with a Wizarding Alcoholics Anonymous contingent and several other magical special interest groups, had been bombed during a gathering, killing sixteen. Survivors of the incident and other members of the group who hadn’t been present were said to be fleeing the country. WPR reported that it seemed an extremist sect was taking responsibility for the bombing via a radio frequency they’d hijacked, 103.4 AM. 

Flora, who was driving, quickly tuned to it. The voice was dead-sounding and processed for anonymity, eerily still against a backdrop of white noise: 

“ — _will no longer stand for a wizarding culture protecting users of stolen magic and stolen wands. Beware, usurpers; beware, blood traitors; beware, beasts in human skin; we will protect our sacred traditions and most dearly held values at any cost, in the name of the Dark Lord, may he rise — ”_

Flora turned off the radio, pulled the van abruptly to the side of the freeway, kicked her door open, and vomited. Imani was obliged to drive the rest of the way into Leeds in a shell-shocked, brutalized silence but for the WPR reporters’ assorted breaking news items and conspiracy theorizing. A windblown-sounding journalist reporting live from Bournemouth interviewed locals who claimed members of the club had been harassed for months. Another, the station’s Ministry Correspondent, reported that insiders were chalking the bombing up to a Death Eater-adjacent pure-blood extremist group calling themselves the Night Watchmen. The name was somehow familiar to Jack but he couldn’t place it. His ears were ringing and he pressed his forehead against the cold glass feeling scraped raw. 

At the venue they loaded in, everything feeling shatterable in its brittle silence, and during their soundcheck Jack watched with something like dread as the lighting and sound engineers leaned toward another in the booth at the back of the hall, shared a whispered smiling conversation, and burst out laughing. His stomach curled. Sixteen dead, and it was only the beginning. He could visualize the cover of the next morning’s _Prophet_ explaining the whole thing away with a vividness he first thought uncanny until he remembered cover stories of that ilk from his Hogwarts days. Isolated Killings. The Work of Delusional Madmen. Poor Spell Regulation and Collapsing Mental Health Infrastructure Leading to Radicalization of the Vulnerable. He thought he needed a dose even without the darkness closing simply to erase it all from his mind. And Ras kept trying to catch his eye, but Jack found he couldn’t let him, even if he tried. 

He went back to the dressing room and did a bump of coke and took his guitar out and tuned it. He played a little of the song that would become “Slouching Toward Bethlehem,” then it wound around to something else — something older, and he sang, his voice like a guttering flame in the stillness: 

_If you took me home to meet your family_  
_I do expect they’d want to kill me;_  
_But when there’s another war, baby  
_ _I need to count on you to save me_

It was likely he remembered it only because the fear had never left his mind. A possessing rabid animal fear, consuming burning fear, conflagration fear, wildfire spreading down the dry mountainside, roaring, devouring. 

_I know you think it’s all quite cool_  
_But I’ve got everything to lose  
_ _Lying in bed with the mud blood blues…_

He stood up, knocking the chair over, and went with his guitar down the hall to Ras’s dressing room. He was sitting with his feet up on the vanity counter chewing his nails listening to WPR, whose prognostications had become still more dire. At least three members of the Bournemouth club who had escaped the bombing had been found dead in their homes. When he saw Jack in the door he looked up with an expression of immense and confused guilt. His face was drawn and pale and he had tightly clenched his jaw. Then he looked away again. 

“There’s something we can do,” Jack said. He leaned up against the vanity counter beside Ras’s feet. 

“What can we possibly do.” 

You of all people don’t get to feel helpless, Jack wanted to tell him. Instead he played the first chord of “Mud Blood Blues.” 

They had played the song live all of once, at the house show following the first _With the Hobgoblins_ tour. A cassette demo existed somewhere, recorded in Seattle the evening after Jack and Ras wrote the song, as did the version the Hobgoblins had recorded in the studio with Ketterslee, on one of about four existing test pressings (later worth hundreds of galleons) of _Erebus and Terror_. 

Ras took his feet down and leaned forward and pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes. A chill coiled in Jack’s belly like a rope and when he sang the opening line it felt like a thick milky venom in his mouth: 

_If you took me home to meet your family  
_ _I do expect they’d want to kill me —_

Ras looked up at him; his eyes were red, a little wet, horribly determined. This is it, Jack understood. However much we have borne between us this is the final fucking straw. He could feel the weight and pressure of a bad headache mounting in the ringing in his ears and something in his chest felt punched through with a dull tool. He later realized this was the exact sensation of heartbreak. His voice died in his throat like a bird but still he dragged his fingers desperately along the neck of the guitar. 

“We can’t,” said Ras. 

Thus spoke the thunder — a crushing and roiling wave of sound. Nuclear shattering.Underneath it all his own voice sounded painfully weak. “Why can’t we?” 

“We just — we can’t.” 

“Don’t,” Jack said, “don’t be afraid.” 

“I’m not afraid.”

“Then what is it?” 

Ras didn’t speak. Eventually he covered his mouth with his hand. There was a tear in the corner of his eye that wouldn’t fall, and Jack stood up and went out the door. He stood in the narrow cigarette-smoky hallway for a while holding his guitar by the neck of it and eventually he heard several loud thumps from inside, but eventually he went back to his dressing room. Later he learned Ras had slammed his head a few times against the wall. 

In an hour or so to a sold-out crowd they played their customary set. Usually Ras would attempt a little banter but this time he didn’t. The crowd cheered and screamed and applauded as though nothing had happened and to Jack each flash of the press cameras in the front row felt like the phosphorus bulb-burst of a crime scene photographer recording the exact positioning of a corpse. Flora hadn’t put makeup on and it was clear she’d been crying; Jack wondered if anyone noticed. 

They were supposed to play “The Heat Death of the Universe” to end the first set again but none of them were surprised when Ras started playing “A Handful of Dust.” He looked to Jack with a kind of desperate dawning expression and so help him Jack nearly burst out laughing. It was almost funny that it seemed Ras finally got it and this was why. But then it solved the sort of question at the end of the song — _do you know what you’ve done to me_ … Or at least it solved the first half of it. When Jack stepped to the mic and the crowd began to sing with him he wished desperately he could tell them to stop. He closed his eyes and imagined an empty room which was the whole world. An endless spreading black chamber in which only himself and Ras existed. In the chorus Ras pressed against him so close he could feel the static. The wash of noise — warmth and heartbeat. He took a painful and severing step back. 

_I can show you fear in a handful of dust  
_ _I can show you fear in a handful of dust_

He opened his eyes. Ras’s pale and drifting and intimately close were wet and bright and his eyelashes clumped with tears and Jack felt nothing but a sort of blurred vengeance. A suffocating, weighty finality. He was supposed to play a solo after the second chorus but instead he grabbed Ras by his guitar and pressed the pickups together. From the amplifiers a shrill and cutting feedback roared. The kids in the front row had their fingers in their ears and the sound guy in his booth had begun scrambling. 

Do you get it, Jack almost said in Ras’s ear. He was trying to remember what, all those years ago, Ras had whispered in his ear before their last show at Bad Magic. Now do you bloody get it? They were standing so close he could feel Ras’s jaw clenching. All the pent-up kinetic motion trapped in him and roiling. Historically this had been a sign he was ready for a fistfight but they hadn’t done that in years. Not since Ras had quit doing coke, but whatever progress he had made in that vein appeared to have been forfeited. Instead he grabbed Jack tightly by the wrist, where his tattoo was. So tightly it hurt and then even tighter as though he could snap it under pressure. Jack tried to pull away and found he couldn’t. Ras’s eyes had stuck in his as sharp and wounded as shattered ice. 

Belatedly they realized Flora and Imani had played the line that was supposed to bring them all into the second verse (in fact they had played that line two or three times) because Flora backed into Ras and hit him in the shoulder with the headstock of her bass, hard. So they played the rest of it. 

They left the stage afterward without fanfare and parted ways to their separate dressing rooms. Jack’s head felt wedged in a tightening vise. He wasn’t sure if he still heard the dregs of the crowd cheering for an encore through the walls or if it was just a kind of manifest tinnitus. His wrist ached and was bleeding in tiny red crescents where Ras’s fingernails (he kept them longish so he could fingerpick a few of his solos) had broken the skin. _In the garden_ , he read; in the mirror it looked like nothing. Like a smudge of blue ink on china dishes or a painting. 

He took his works out from the leather film bag Disillusioned in the pocket of his coat and spread them out on the vanity table and considered. If the Bournemouth event was the beginning perhaps suicide would be the most intelligent option. Suicide by overdose, a kind of pleasurable drowning, would be far preferable to suicide by remaining alive in the public eye, which was the other option. Either this works or death, or it works and death, Ras had said years ago, presciently. The club members who had been found dead in their homes had been tortured by _Crucio_ and by other means. They were examples which were being set. _This is what happens to people like you_. The example they could make him set if they so desired would be larger and still more visible. _This is what happens when people like you overstep their bounds. This is what happens when they are loud._

Flora would find his body, because she usually came to get him for their encore. He wasn’t sure if she had more of that potion and anyway there had to be a dose large enough that would be unsurvivable. There were two fingerprinted vials remaining in the film bag in which the blood was pale and metallic and viscous. So much as looking at them filled him with a familiar longing. 

(It is likely it was this moment Jack was thinking of in Byberry when he wrote the piece of “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” most interpreted by fans: 

_Take me under  
__Take me over  
__Hold me, forever…_ ) 

He scrounged for his cigarettes and lit the last one. He uncapped one of the vials, and filled the syringe with its entire contents. A single vial would last him usually for three days. The way it moved in the chamber was like stardust. Stirring and shifting. Like dust moving in a shaft of light — 

Thence came the knock upon the door. “Jackie?” It was Flora. Now or never, he thought. His hands were shaking. It was of no matter, because when he didn’t immediately answer she forced the door. She took all the stuff from him and emptied the syringe back into the vial and capped it and made him sit. He must’ve said something stupid to her, because she slapped him across the face. Then her voice tuned in, like a faulty radio. 

“ — can’t, you can’t, we can’t; this is exactly what they want, don’t you get it? How overjoyed they would be if you killed yourself?” 

“Flora — ”

“There are Muggle-born and half blood kids who come and see us every night. Who — the two of us are all they bloody got.” 

“I haven't — they never come and talk to us.” 

“They do and we just can’t tell. Or they’re afraid.” Her voice was shaking with angry tears. “They can’t know we’re afraid. They just can’t.” 

“They’ll kill us both, Flora; they’ll do something — ”

She slapped him again. “You think I don’t fucking know that. You think all of us don’t know that.” 

“He doesn’t know that.” 

She bit her lower lip so tightly it turned white. “Of course he bloody does.” 

“He doesn’t get — he doesn’t.” 

Flora made a sound. Like a tiny sob she swallowed before it might grow. “Jack,” she said. But then she stopped. 

“How,” he asked her. He couldn’t look her in the face, and he was aware, distantly, that he was treading somewhere unwise. He meant to wound her with guilt but perhaps he was better at doing that in song. “How did you and Mani keep it together, when we couldn’t?” 

Something cold passed between them, and Flora stood. She took a step back, away from Jack, she straightened, and she crossed her arms tightly across her chest. Her mouth opened then it closed again. Silence circling like liquid around a slow drain. “Don’t,” she finally said. Her tears were in her voice still but so was a new edge of anger, sharp and sheer as shattered glass, and the sympathy behind her eyes had walled off. “You can’t pretend you don’t know.” 

Indeed he couldn’t. He covered his eyes with his hand. The sob that shook him was like a wringing but silent. He could tell — like the tearing crepe-paper edge of it, thin as lace, still as cold ashes — the pressing closing darkness wasn’t far. Like so much else he knew it would creep up on him as ever when his back was turned away from it. 

His heart was slamming as though it understood what he had almost done, and his wrist hurt where Ras had grabbed it. “Flora,” he said, not sure why; perhaps to keep her from leaving, but she had already turned her back and in her narrow wake she slammed the door. Beyond the echoing pulse of it were the sounds of the crowd screaming. They had been offstage altogether too long, Jack realized; they were being demanded — summoned as if by spellwork — for an encore. 

He turned into the mirror. Carefully he cleaned up the syringe and vials and tucked them back in the leather film bag. It would be his turn to drive that night he knew and so perhaps he could take a dose after the gig but it would have to be a small one. It seemed so mundane after everything — it would be his turn to drive. Imani’s turn to levitate the big amps into the back of the van. Flora’s turn to break down the merch table. Ras’s turn to buy them breakfast at whatever seedy diner they could find in the morning. They would sit together at a table as they always did in silence eating ravenously listening to the whispers and the eyes and he would be remembering their first tours when no one had had a clue who they were and as such all the whispers and the eyes were owing only to the state of their clothes and hair and the loudness of the laughter and the salacious stories they shared and the screaming fluorescence of whatever that thing was between the four of them that seemed in those days inviolable. Contra mundum, he remembered thinking. The Hobgoblins contra mundum. In fact that was initially what he had wanted to call their third album before the unicorn blood had taken hold of him. 

He knew, he thought, how Flora and Imani had kept it together. They had not taken any of it for granted. And they had been honest. And they had overcome each and every fear… 

There was a commotion in the hallway and then a knock at the door. It was Ras, dead-eyed, with a cigarette. “What did you say to them?” 

“What?” 

“Nevermind. It doesn't matter now. We have to go back out. The manager is worried they’ll riot.” 

“What about — ”

“The girls aren’t coming.” He dropped the cigarette ember and rubbed it out beneath his shoe on the hardwoods. “Get your guitar.” 

Aside from demos they hadn’t rehearsed or recorded anything without Imani and Flora for years, and they had always refused to play acoustic sets on principle. Still they set off together down the hallway toward the stage. “What are we going to play?” Jack asked. 

Ras wouldn’t meet his eye. “I don’t know.” 

The crowd was chanting something he couldn’t make out and his every step felt leaden. As though toward his own very public execution. Perhaps this was how it would feel when it did happen. Ras would lead him… 

The light when they stepped out into it was blinding and the sound from the room erupted. The stage was strewn with trash and beer cans and a single depressing, wilted rose, which Ras picked up and stuck in the ripping-open pocket of his shirt. From the front row a selection of squashed-looking young women shrieked. Ras looked up at him and caught his eye, nakedly, raw, and the only expression on his face was fear. Then he looked away again. 

There was only one thing to do. Jack played the opening chords of John Cale’s “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend.” The song he had played for Ras in the front room at the house in Fortis Green the first afternoon he had visited. The first song he had taught to Ras and the first song they had played together. 

The crowd was quiet; perhaps they hadn’t heard the song before. Since 1984 it had slipped off the Hobgoblins’ list of covers they regularly performed live. When they had played it in the early days at the house and on MGC Jack had transposed the piano part to his guitar and Ras had played the echoing distorted strumming in the background. It was a miracle Ras remembered it after everything but he did; the sound fortified and strengthened. Jack took a step toward the mic and prayed his voice didn’t shake. 

_Standing waiting for a man to show_  
_Wide eyed one eye fixed on the door  
_ _This waiting’s killing me, it’s wearing me down_

But for their sound there was only silence. He could feel Ras watching him and turned to meet his eye. In that electric thing stretched out between them stretching tearing fraying everything else was static. 

_Darkness warmer than a bedroom floor_  
_Want you to hold me close forevermore_  
_I’m a sleeping dog, but you can’t tell  
_ _When I’m on the prowl you better run like hell_

The drums were supposed to kick in here, so they just played louder. Ras took a step closer. The soft damp bud of the rose in his shirtpocket pressed against Jack’s chest like a cold kiss. 

_Say, fear is a man’s best friend  
_ _You add it up it brings you down_

It was not so much singing as it was screaming. Historically Ras had sung the second verse on his own but Jack found stepping back from the mic seemed like a kind of surrender. He would not — could not — let Ras architect the end of it on his own, not if this was the end, as it had been the beginning, as it had been the bridge and the chorus and the coda and the refrain, fear, fear, fear, fear, you add it up it brings you down — 

_You know it makes sense_  
_Don’t even think about it_  
_Life and death are things you just do when you’re bored  
_ _Say, fear is a man’s best friend…_

Ras took a diplomatic step back and cast just about every distortion spell on his guitar at once. The sound was like the opposite of an exorcism. Jack abandoned his own guitar and took hold of the mic, took it out of the stand and screamed. 

_Say, fear is a man’s best friend_  
_Say, fear is a man’s best friend  
_ _Say, fear is a man’s best friend_

Jack was hardly good at making his voice sound pretty but it was harder still to make it sound ugly. Ugly like a purging, like vomiting. Eventually he fell on his knees. Ras had pressed his guitar up against the largest and heaviest of the amplifiers and was scraping the pickup over the speaker. His teeth were grit. He thunked his forehead determinedly against the box of it rather more heavily than was normal. 

_Say, fear is a man’s best friend_  
_Say, fear is a man’s best friend  
_ _Say, fear is a man’s best friend_

As if suddenly possessed or struck by lightning Ras took a step back from the amplifier. Something almost eerily calm had come over his face that Jack thought he remembered. He undid his guitar strap and lifted his instrument by the headstock and the neck into the air. Then he smashed it against the concrete stage floor. The body broke off on the first blow; the sound of it under all the spells was almost deafening. The strings popped and coiled. Ras raised what was left of the neck and smashed it to splinters. The larger pieces he held against the floor and broke with his foot. 

Then Ras came to Jack who was still kneeling and whose “singing” had devolved into a sort of horrific and guttural screaming, like the death cry of a mortally wounded animal. He crouched behind Jack and with something almost like gentleness he undid the strap of Jack’s guitar and slipped it out from under his arm. Then he smashed it also against the floor. The body of Jack’s guitar was hardier and took a few powerful blows to shatter off the neck. Sweat had started standing out on Ras’s forehead, and he had bitten through his lip, there was blood in his mouth standing out around his teeth. Pieces of shrapnel and broken strings had cut his hands and the blood tracked in thin inklike rivulets over his white overalls. 

Some of the kids in the front row were lifting each other forward onto the stage in order to grab shards of wood and fiberglass that had come almost within reach. Some of the pieces were still large enough to carry remnants of distortion spells and Jack pressed a few together under his free hand. Then he pressed the mic against them, but he kept screaming. Ras paced for a while, running his bloody hands through his hair. The desperate madman never far from the surface of himself had seized him and indeed wouldn’t fully let go again for several months. Then he sat cross-legged not far from Jack, watching him with a kind of dazed curiosity. He was sucking on the worst of the wounds, on the pad of his thumb, which was bleeding profusely and later required stitches. 

This went on, they later learned, for perhaps twenty minutes, during which time the hall slowly cleared out entirely. Imani and Flora had long since gone out to the van and were listening to updates from Bournemouth on WPR whilst sharing a 40 of malt liquor they had purchased at a Muggle gas station. By that time the death toll had risen to twenty-five, and the next morning, when the incident was on positively none of their minds, it would be capped officially at thirty-two. 

Jack and Ras finally learned they were alone in the venue when the house staff turned the lights on and killed the sound. Ras went to the toilet and came out with his injured thumb bound in a comical wad of toilet paper which did not take very long to bleed through. Jack went to his dressing room and carefully measured a dose small enough to drive under. Then the two of them loaded out, unspeaking, because Imani and Flora were feigning sleep in the back of the van. It was just past midnight when they climbed in and started the engine. They did a bump of coke each off Ras’s keys, and Ras put a Sonic Youth tape on, and they drove south. 

Later, even when asked repeatedly — in court, under oath, withdrawing, shaking sick; he could hardly see, hardly breathe under the suffocating weight of it; the lawyers were obliged to repeat every question three or four times; he was wholly and achingly and completely alone — Jack did not remember when he started drifting. 

\--

By the time they were bailed from central booking in Doncaster by Mitzi Love and a host of MLE officers the darkness had begun already to close in around Jack like a sort of unfriendly and suffocating embrace. Though the vials and syringe shattered in his coatpocket constituted no contraband it was likely Muggle police officers had seen before they had still confiscated it, before it was confiscated from them in turn by the MLE officers, with the added precaution of assorted memory-wiping spells. As such the rest of the band were side-alonged to St. Mungo’s (Imani and Flora would be released later that evening with no injuries more severe than whiplash, though Ras was placed under an involuntary psychological hold and confined to the wing on the sixth floor commonly treated as a kind of waiting room for institutionalization at St. Kelly’s or elsewhere) and Jack was escorted, half-blind, ears ringing, to the Ministry’s Department of Criminal Justice, and to the featureless basement cell where he spent three weeks painfully withdrawing before the Ministry lawyers somehow judged him competent enough to stand trial. 

He remembered precious little of these weeks later, for which he supposed he was thankful, though at the time every day seemed interminable, inasmuch as there was no day, there was only darkness. He lay in the tiny cot under an itchy wool blanket with his eyes closed shaking. He did not think he slept and if he did he remembered every nightmare in vivid hallucinatory detail. At some juncture whoever had been dispatched to make sure he didn’t kill himself realized he had not enough of his faculties about him to eat or drink and as such a doctor was sent from St. Mungo’s who sedated him with magic and provided fluids and nutrients intravenously as Muggles did with coma patients. Perhaps it was at its worst at this point and Jack was certain he had gotten somehow into the wrong hands and was about to be executed by lethal injection. 

Not much study has been done about the circumstances and symptoms of unicorn blood withdrawal, at least in European and American magical communities, where the substance is so contraband that to be found with traces on one’s clothes could indeed lead to a prison sentence. The Canadian Magical Congress quietly decriminalized unicorn blood possession in 1985 after an epidemic of overdoses among Indigenous and Muggle-born populations finally reached the pure-blood wizards of Western Ontario, and as such a few addiction treatment clinics were opened across the nation. Most of Western scholarship surrounding the condition comes from researchers working with these clinics. [The magical congresses of Thailand, Laos, Azerbaijan, Papua New Guinea, and Zimbabwe have also decriminalized unicorn blood possession — ed.] It has been reported that fifteen percent of addicts in withdrawal in a clinic die in the process, customarily by suicide; scholars estimate that the percentage is substantially higher — perhaps 40% — for those withdrawing outside of treatment. Solicited by Xenophilus Lovegood himself to respond to a Letter to the Editor about the exact manifestation of the unicorn blood curse, Jack wrote the following for the Quibbler from Byberry in 1992: 

_In all honesty, it felt like something scraping over and over inside my skin with a potato peeler. Or like instead of what I usually injected into my veins I had injected a trillion tiny razor blades. Like being set on fire via your blood and expanding outward. Meanwhile there’s this thing in your head wringing it like a wet cloth until all your worst memories fall out. Twisting and squeezing and twisting and squeezing. It takes a second break to breathe and then it does it again. It does this even in your dreams. You can’t really see, or rather what you can see is like a kind of gauzy darkness, so time doesn’t really move. I had lost track after not very long that I was a living person in a body and not just a conscious manifestation of pain. Which is why customarily people withdrawing either commit suicide or forget to eat until they die._

_The other thing is the paranoia which may have been exacerbated in my case as part of me knew the whole time I was in a holding cell in the Ministry basement and the Bournemouth attack had just happened. I am very serious when I say it is like the only sensations you are aware of having felt / can remember having felt are pain and fear. I remember they would send people in to check I was alive or a doctor with potions to administer via IV and I was convinced they were there to kill me in one or another very florid and dramatic ways. Another paranoid certainty was that it would feel like this forever and would never go away (and indeed now about 15 months later sometimes I get like cobwebs in the corners of my vision, or I can’t eat for days, migraines etc.; indeed no one can tell me if it ever really closes up), and another was that while I was here suffering similar horrors were being visited upon less deserving loved ones, etc etc._

_I am entirely certain no one gets into this because they think it will be “fun” and indeed being an addict is not fun. It is not fun to know at every moment there are about six hours leeway standing between you and a five-week personal visitation by most of hell’s demons. It is not even all that fun to be high. After a while you are only doing it to stave off the curse, and you hate it, and also yourself and most things, but it’s like breathing, if breathing tortured you. It is difficult to evoke much feeling at all but fear and you can only grasp the reality of yourself for about half an hour when the fear is almost on you. Which is why it is appropriate that the withdrawal feels like walking into a black room with fear itself but you can’t see it. You just know it’s there and sometimes you can feel it breathing and reaching for you in the darkness._

_Anyway I have written too much already but I will say, there has been precious little research done into unicorn blood addiction and withdrawal / the “curse” as it were, because it is generally assumed those of us who have abused it have done so out of a certain moral bankruptcy and as such deserve whatever is coming to us. While this is certainly true for some (and indeed it is true for my first dealer) I can only tell you that I started out of fear and desperation and I am not alone. This is a problem like any other of wizarding Britain’s social problems in that it’s rooted in our most glaring and consistent inequity by which I refer of course to blood-purism (to say nothing of remaining and intersectional systems of sexism, racism, homophobia, etc)._

The letter subsequently made the rounds throughout the wizarding press, and the Quibbler was sent a variety of colorful hate mail as well as letters in support, the latter of which were forwarded to Jack by the newspaper staff. It spurred a renewed debate about unicorn blood abuse among the magical community, engendering opinion pieces in the _Prophet_ and other publications, and it engendered increased speculation and optimism among Hobgoblins fans, who had heard positively nothing from Jack since the Leeds show and the van crash. Most understood that when he referred to his first dealer he was referring to Davis Rorschach (who most of them knew had initially been a school friend of Ras’s), and fans combed the lyrics of _Decline and Fall_ again for clues beyond the obvious. 

However, unicorn blood possession was not decriminalized in Britain until 1998, and in America until 2005. Certainly at the time of Jack’s arrest and trial for possession it was the most criminalized it ever was, as the Ministry’s Department of Magical Controls had decided to respond punitively to the growing trend of abuse. As such he was informed after three weeks of withdrawal — when he could almost follow the public defender’s index finger shifting left-to-right just past his nose — that the Ministry’s prosecutors had proposed a ten-year sentence in Azkaban. He could not say he was surprised. “Usually they only do that for possession with intent to sell,” the lawyer explained. “But their thinking is that with your public profile — ” 

He nodded, and she stopped there. He could scarcely see her, just the suggestion of her pantsuit and large hair. “They can make an example of me,” he said. His voice echoed in the big black room. 

He still hurt, but the hurt was less, and his vision was coming back, but his ears were still ringing. The screaming red migraine which had lasted seemingly the complete three weeks had begun to wring a little less tightly behind his eyes. 

“Well yes,” she said. “They intend to. But we can bring them precedent — most possession cases are sentenced to three years in Byberry or Delaney and serve even less contingent on good behavior. I’m prepared to argue it’s not your public profile they are thinking of in increasing the sentence. There would seem to be precedent for that too.” 

He jumped when he felt her hand on his wrist, and she pulled away. The trial date was set for Tuesday, she told him, which meant not much because he wasn’t sure what day it was. “What else can I do for you, honey,” she asked, from what he thought was the door. Sometimes he realized he wasn’t sure what the cell looked like. 

“Is Ras alright?” 

“Is who?” 

She had been informed of the particulars of his case and nothing more, he reminded himself. By the age of her voice she was of the demographic to listen primarily to Celestina Warbeck. 

“The rest of them,” he said. “Of my band. Ra— Stubby Boardman. And Imani and Flora.” 

“Ah, well, I’m not sure, but there are letters here for you; I could read — ”

“No — no thank you. It’s alright.” 

He heard the door shut and lay back down on the cot and covered his head with the wool blanket. Certainly Azkaban could be no worse than this. And there perhaps he would be safe from whatever was coming. He knew he slept, because the nightmare — he was alone at Ras’s funeral — was familiar. 

Next to visit him was Whyland, the day before the trial. He started crying when he heard her voice certain she had come to tell him the worst had happened. She sat next to him on the cot and held his hand. She smelled like lavender and she had with her a thermos of Earl Grey tea with cream and sugar and they shared it. First she told him that Ras was still on a psych hold at St. Mungo’s and that she had been allowed to see him only twice since his commitment but that the Wizengamot was forcing him to testify. “In the end it’ll help you,” she explained, “because he’ll say that you had no intent to distribute and with that testimony they can’t in good faith keep Azkaban on the table.” 

“But they will anyway.” 

“They will, but they won’t convince the court. We’ve made sure of that.” 

“How do you mean?” 

She squeezed his hand. “We’ve made sure of it,” she said again. 

Everyone knew much of the Wizengamot’s business was conducted via bribery. Whyland’s all-too-brief tenure would indeed be unprecedented in this respect, but she would not assume her seat for another three months. She and Ras had convinced the court’s two existing Boardmans to rule in Jack’s favor, and they in turn had convinced their usual allies, probably with money, or, at the very least, offers of weekends in the country at Rexley Hall or the other Boardman estates. 

In the end, Whyland was present at the trial, shadowing her aunt Nasturtia, smoking cigarettes in the back row. Ras was also present, accompanied ostentatiously by a St. Mungo’s doctor, but he was hustled off immediately after giving his testimony, which was that Jack had never sold any drugs including and especially unicorn blood. “His drug dependency isn’t so much a habit as it is a mental illness,” Ras said, unsolicited, guiltily; but perhaps he thought it would help, “it has been since like 1984.” He was dismissed back into St. Mungo’s guardianship and the very next afternoon he was carted off (against his will, he later claimed) to St. Kelly’s in Northumberland, and Jack didn’t see him until that July in Byberry. It was that spring in the hospital, near-suicidally depressed, that Ras wrote much of _In Felicitas,_ hence its overarching air of balladry and decay. 

During the trial Jack’s terror had worsened the withdrawal symptoms somewhat and as such he was certain the Boardmans of the court would turn on him and he would be presently carted off to Azkaban. Or, worse, that he was already there and just couldn’t tell. But he could smell Whyland’s cigarettes, because she smoked a very particular brand of cloves. He kept his hands folded tightly in his lap and looked toward the sound of whoever’s voice in the echoing darkness and tried to answer every question in complete and unshaking sentences but it was difficult especially when he had to ask both the prosecutor and his defender to repeat their questions several times each as he couldn’t hear them through the ringing migraine. They asked him to give up his dealers and he did, gladly, though Rorschach wouldn’t be apprehended until 1993 (he had taken to drinking Polyjuice) and the bartender at the Wells had already been arrested, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, extradited to France where she faced murder charges. They asked him when he had started taking unicorn blood and why and he told them. They asked if he had ever sold it and he said no. Then he laughed. In the echo and shadow it sounded like something scraping over stone. “I wouldn’t do this to somebody else.” 

His defense attorney asked him if he had ever been unfairly targeted because of his race or Muggle-born status. The prosecution objected as to the question’s relevance but Jack’s attorney pressed on. “Never before has this court debated such inflated charges for possession of less than an ounce of unicorn blood,” she said. 

“Empty vials were found — ”

“Clearly because he himself had emptied them. Is that true, Jack?” 

She spoke to him in a gentle and motherly tone, slowly so he could understand. Kinder, he thought he remembered, than his own mother. “Yes,” he said. 

“I would just like it entered into the public record that my client is a very convenient person to make an example of and it appears that’s what’s on the prosecution’s mind. I am curious as to whether you would’ve pursued the same punishment for his friend Mr. Boardman if he was in this unfortunate position.” 

In the end it was over quickly. Like tearing off a bandaid. The court retreated for a few minutes’ debate and returned with a verdict and a sentence, which was that Jack was guilty of possession but not of intent to distribute, and that he would spend three years in Scotland’s Byberry Prison, with the possibility of parole after two. He couldn’t summon much of a feeling about it and was escorted back to his basement cell from the chambers, handcuffed, guided like a blind man by his lawyer, who had rested her hand gently upon his shoulder. 

\--

It was not the end, though it felt like it, for a long while. It took Flora the longest to speak to him again (she did not write herself nor sign Imani’s postcards until March 1992), and it took months before he could write songs again even after Ras brought him the guitar. 

Alone in his small white room he imagined the loneliness as a dull knife. He closed his eyes and imagined Ras was with him. He stopped trying to remember and play their old songs and he remembered the days when they had lived in the Fortis Green house together and he would go into Ras’s room in the middle of the night and sit on the edge of his bed and play a kind of messy snapshot of an imagining that they could only weave into gold thread together. Eventually he realized he was going to need to teach himself to write connections between verses and bridges and choruses or else all his songs would be one minute long and have no sense of dynamic or variation. 

Ras came and brought cassettes to listen to and books to read and sent long letters explaining nothing. Jack wrote long letters explaining everything, which he kept in a notebook under his mattress in lieu of sending. The _Prophet_ was brought to his cell weekly and he read every last word. Eventually he asked Imani to send a pocket radio and when she did he tuned it to WPR and kept it on every hour of the day even while he slept. The guards started bringing around the _Quibbler_ as a joke but he read that too. In the summer of 1992 Mutterings began to arise that did not have to be read between the lines. Muggle Hikers Found Dead By Magical Means. Muggle-Born Professors Dismissed from Ilvermorny and Richmond Institute. Lucius Malfoy and Theodore Nott Sr. Elected to Hogwarts School Board… 

In February of 1993, two years after the van accident almost to the day, another Muggle-born club was firebombed, this time in Norwich; twelve died and thirty were wounded. This time the Night Watchmen claimed responsibility via magical signatures emblazoned like graffiti around the crime scene, different in symbology from the Dark Mark (theirs, borrowed from white supremacists, was a Celtic cross interwoven with thorns) but too alike in delivery to be coincidence. Terror was rife among Muggle-borns nationwide according to reports on WPR but pure-bloods seemed unbothered enough to continue debating the situation via the Opinion pages of the _Prophet_. Jack avoided the open areas of the prison and stayed in bed listening to the radio. A few days after with his lunch was delivered an atypically short letter from Ras: 

_I am sure you have seen the news. I wish I could be with you. Do you want me to come and visit?_

_Realizing now, extremely belatedly, how dismissive and cruel I was to you last time this happened. And how much evolved from that night and that moment. I have been trying to tell you for two years it is my greatest regret that I didn’t stand up with you when you asked and play your brilliant song and show them all that I was with you. That I AM with you and I want to be better. I need to be better and it can’t be too late. I refuse to accept it. I want to do something. Whyland is trying. I want to sit with you and have a cup of tea and play music._

_I miss you desperately and I’m so sorry. And mostly I am sorry that I am just realizing now how sorry._

_I love you, I mean it. Forever and ever. RQB_

He read it a few times over and thought about burning it. His heart felt tugging — forced in, like a door. He thought of all the unsent letters in his notebook under the mattress, and he thought about responding only with, _It is too late, I’m sorry_. He had longed for a letter like this for two years and now that it had arrived he wasn’t sure how to feel about it, or what to say, or if he believed it. 

After a little while he found some parchment and wrote: 

_I wish I believed you, because you sound so sincere and I think you believe yourself. But I don’t believe you._

Parchment was too precious to waste so he ripped the sentence out and burnt it in his fingers. He put the letter under his bed with the rest of the letters he needed to respond to and lay down. He thought perhaps he felt about forgiveness much as he had felt about unicorn blood at the end: it was the sort of horrible crutch of a drug one took just to stave off whatever came after, which was worse. 

The next morning one of the guards came by to tell him to get up as he had a visitor. He was almost certain it had to be Ras and desperately didn’t want to so much as look at his face but the jailer assured him it was not. He knew Imani and Flora were away somewhere because he had received a postcard from them not two days previous postmarked from Walvis Bay, Namibia, and for a few minutes as the guard escorted him into the visiting room he was petrified with fear it was one of his parents, simply by process of elimination. But then he remembered Byberry was thoroughly warded against Muggles, and his parents hadn’t spoken to him in years, had no way of knowing where he was, and likely didn't care, and anyway alone at a table but for a pack of cigarettes and a paper bag was Lupin. He must’ve been in his early thirties though as had been customary nearly a decade previous he looked simultaneously like some ageless and undying Sisyphus on a much-needed break from shoving against the stone. He watched in a tight-lipped silence as the officers secured Jack’s wrists to the table with magic. “I thought you were in Newfoundland,” Jack said when they went away. 

“That was eight bloody years ago,” Lupin said. He was smiling a little crookedly in the corner of his mouth in this way that felt to Jack like mainlining liquid nostalgia. “How are you holding up?” 

“As can be expected. I’m eligible for parole in two months.” 

“Did you hear about — ” 

His brow had furrowed in the center as it did when he was concerned, so he meant Norwich. “Yes,” Jack said, “but we shouldn’t talk about it. Not now when it’s been eight years and I’ve no idea what you’ve been up to.” 

Lupin’s brow didn’t unfurrow, but the crooked corner-smile bent up. “Mostly research and writing and some teaching in the States and in Canada. I will say even in rural America where they don’t have phones or telly or any of it your songs are still inescapable on the radio.” 

“Still.” 

“Well yes, you know I just got back here on Friday.” He lit a second cigarette and then passed it across the table and put it between Jack’s lips. Then he emptied the paper bag, which contained ten or so cassette tapes and a block of very dark chocolate that looked as though it’d been cut with an axe. “Ras said you had a tape player with you.” 

“He gave it to me toward the beginning.” Awkwardly with his wrists on the table he looked through the tapes. “I’ve never even heard of any of these bands before.” 

“You’ll like this one,” said Lupin. He indicated a cassette with a bloody red cover — _Slanted and Enchanted_ by Pavement. “They’re from sort of the haunted part of California. Which is where I was until a week ago.” 

“What were you doing out there?” 

“Searching for these — I’ll show you.” He took out his wallet from his back pocket and from the folds of it alongside a few crumpled American bills drew a Muggle photograph of a skinny and sinuous pale creature billowing mostly legs, which he passed across the table toward Jack. “It’s called a nightcrawler and it’s still classified as a magical cryptid.” 

“Did you find any?” 

“Kind of.” His smile was sort of brittle. “I found a dead one. And I found where they lived, but they wouldn’t talk to me.” 

“Wouldn’t or couldn’t?” 

“Ah,” he said, “emphatically wouldn’t.” 

When Lupin took the photograph back Jack could see how vivid the tearing history of white and red scars set like cryptic messaging into the backs of his hands and his fingers and his wrists. 

“What’d you come back for?” 

“A better job. Unicorn liaison with the Ministry.” 

Jack couldn’t look at him all of a sudden and as such busied himself rubbing the ember of the cigarette out in the ashtray on the table. Of course Lupin would only work six months at this job before the Event of late August and his subsequent, rather shocking hiring at Hogwarts as Professor of Defense Against the Dark Arts. However, working closely with the herds of the southern Peak District in his short tenure, Lupin would eventually supply the information which would lead to the apprehension and arrest of Davis Rorschach as well as half the Macclesfield contingent of unicorn hunters. But at the time all this, and the truth, seemed so impossible as to be the stuff of distant fantasy. 

“They’re very forgiving creatures,” Lupin went on. Jack scoffed so loudly the conversation at the neighboring table silenced. “The curse is actually rather ironic when juxtaposed with their behavior and personality. They have little prejudice. They have two more sections in their brains than we do implying they’re capable of feeling — ”

“God — stop. You can stop.” 

“The only person — the only, like, living entity, who hasn’t forgiven you is you, is what I’m saying.” 

You’re one to tell me that, he almost said, didn’t say. You who have been eating yourself alive for twelve years telling me to let it go like so much dust in the wind. He knew Lupin understood as well as he that forgiveness was its own distinctly potent and addictive narcotic. Still he asked, “So you, then, you’ve forgiven me.” 

“Yes,” Lupin said, “I mean, it was difficult. You couldn’t get away from that fucking song even in rural Newfoundland. And then you kept making records and they kept being bloody good.” 

“It was a good run we had I suppose.” 

“You mean you won’t go back to it when you get out of here?” 

Jack shook his head. “Not with Ras.” 

“Why not?” 

He decided it was best not to tell Lupin about the letter. “Either we talk about positively nothing at all or we fight explosively.” 

“About what?” 

“What have we ever fought about. That thing he’s got that I don’t.” 

Lupin nodded once, curtly, getting it; he sat back and took out his pack of cigarettes again, and he lit two in his mouth and gave one to Jack. “I’m half blood,” he said. “Did I ever tell you? Aside of course from the other thing.” 

Jack shook his head; he hadn’t known. 

“My da was a freelance cursebreaker and my mom was a Muggle. So I dare say you and I probably got the same sorts of nicknames from Slytherins when we were in school. But my three best friends — ” his mouth twisted, just enough that you would only see it if you were looking for it — “were all pure-blood. One was — well, clearly you know what one was. And the other was a Peverell, kind of watered down but nonetheless, and the third was a Pettigrew who stood to inherit an estate in Newcastle. Which he never did, because he died.” 

“What was that like, when you were in school?” 

“It was twofold a bit because of the other thing. And I think it was different in my day, because at least for my first five years at Hogwarts no one had heard Voldemort’s name except very certain pure-bloods of particular families. But they tried really very hard, the three of them, for as long as we knew each other, but I don’t think any of them ever really grasped it. But I loved them anyway, until the end. I still bloody do.” 

“How in hell did you manage that?” 

“I’m very accustomed to tying a piece of myself off and burying it. But I don’t recommend that. It’ll fight its way out as you well know.” He leant conspiratorially across the table toward Jack. “Here it is: pure-blood wizards never grasp this thing about you in the way that you need them to. Not completely. They can and will pretend and sometimes it will be enough but usually it won’t be. So you just have to decide if you can stomach that or not. If it’s worth it to forgive them every time they fuck up or if it isn’t.” 

“Was it worth it for you?” 

“It was, in spades, every day until it wasn’t.” He ground out his cigarette in the ashtray between them. “That’s a bit rubbish advice but it’s the filthy truth of it or so I’ve learned.” 

“I’ve nothing else to do in here but worry about the next war,” Jack said. “And what Ras will do and all the rest of it.” 

“I’ve nothing else to do in the real world but the very same. I don’t know what Ras will do. But Whyland made a very controversial proposition to the Wizengamot just two days ago after the Norwich news encouraging an all-out ban on all wizarding clubs and collectives that require pure blood to join.” 

“Whyland’s about ten times braver than Ras is.” 

“Perhaps true. But neither of you are as cowardly as you think you are.” 

“You haven't seen either of us since — ”

“I saw Ras yesterday,” Lupin said. This time the crooked thing twisting in his face was not so much a smile. “He told me to bring you some tapes.” 

“What else did he tell you?” 

“That he’d realized something about himself and how and why he’d hurt you and blah blah blah.” 

“He’s such a bloody idiot.” 

“They usually are. I would say you should talk to him point blank to his face next time he comes here and tell him what it is. Then again I’ve never followed my own advice to that effect but I’ve always regretted it.” 

The warden rung the bell that signaled the end of visiting hours and when Lupin stood, brushing ash from the lapel of his coat, Jack felt suddenly panicked over the prospect of being alone again. Lupin packed up the tapes and the chocolate again into the paper bag and folded the top over neatly as Jack’s mom had done each morning when she made his lunch to take to school, before the arrival of his Hogwarts letter and the subsequent upheaval. “You can write to me if you want,” Lupin said. “I’ve lodgings in Macclesfield. Ras said you lived there for a while and maybe — ”

“I can’t recommend anything for you to do there besides lie in bed and stare out the window.” 

“Ah,” Lupin said, embarrassed, looking away. “Well — ”

I hope you can do something, Jack did not say. I hope you can do anything. “Goodbye, then,” he said instead. “Thank you for the tapes.” 

“You’ll like them,” Lupin said, “and it’ll help. It always helps.” 

“The chocolate, or — ”

“No, obviously; music is the only bloody thing that helps.” 

He squeezed Jack’s shoulder, and he allowed the warden to escort him out toward the gates. Past the sort of airlock of shield charms he caught Jack’s eye and waved. His smile was small and forced and tight, and then he was gone. 

A second officer came and undid the magical shackles on Jack’s wrists and searched through the paper bag to ascertain it contained no contraband and, when sufficiently assured, allowed Jack to hold it as he was escorted back to his cell. His lunch was already inside the door and he nearly tripped over it. It was macaroni and cheese which was already cold and had congealed grotesquely, and a mealy bruised apple and a cup of discolored water. 

He sat on his bed and looked through the tapes, and he broke off a bit of the chocolate and sucked on it. He ate the apple with more chocolate and drank the glass of water slowly imagining it was a fine scotch, and eventually he took his notebook and all the unsent letters out from under the mattress. They were pressed flat and fragile as flowers and the paper soft as butter and the oldest among them tearing a little at the seams. He spread them all out on the floor like a sort of tapestry as he had once laid out his photographs in the living room in Fortis Green to construct with them a sort of narrative at first inscrutable until one looked at it from afar and above. Then it weaved a sort of map of its own — an improbable projection. 

He studied them, searching as ever for the pattern he knew existed, and chewed his nails. At last he found a bit of parchment and began to write: 

_Ras, I wish I believed you, because you sound so sincere and I think you believe yourself. I don’t believe you, or at least I don’t right now._

_But I think I could._


	8. Chapter 8

**April 1993**

Jack did not pack his things until the very day. He was not certain it would be allowed to happen when all was said and done. And besides he had not so many things — he had the guitar, and the tapes, and his walkman, and the old press clippings and photographs El had sent. The stacks of letters and his most essential books, and the notebook in which he had written poetry and lyrics and lines of music in notation he didn’t think was accurate whatsoever, which he had been obliged to add pages to with magic. 

His wand was with his civilian clothes under lock and key with the warden but they were presented to him, and his release paperwork was signed. He was assigned a parole officer named Lisa Nguyen who he would be obliged to meet monthly in London and her contact information was given him on a slip of parchment. With the clothing in which he had been admitted two years previous (black jeans, boots, wool socks with holes in the heel, ivory fisherman’s sweater, Ras’s Crushing Valerian t-shirt) there was an envelope containing he supposed all the cash he presently had access to. A single galleon, four sickles, three Muggle pounds and sixpence. The keys to the Denman Road flat which presumably belonged to him no longer. The keys to the Fortis Green house, for a lock which had long ago been changed. The keys to the wrecked van. The keychain itself he had bought in Salem, Massachusetts, on their first tour, when they played the student center at the local all-witches college. It was a hunk of the hardy American wandwood carven in the shape of a noose, and years of worrying at it in his pockets had made it smooth and soft. And, finally, there were three very stale cigarettes, in a flattened blue cardboard pack. 

“There’s a Muggle bus to Inverness from the library in Lairg,” said the warden, sealing Jack’s file with a few drops of black wax pressed with a signet. “Couple hours walk down the loch to the Southeast.” 

They gave him a Muggle garbage bag for his things, which he tied shut and lightened with magic and slung over his shoulder. The guitar he carried under the other arm. The officers walked him out into the yard and through the chain gates and the blurry grayish fields of specially developed spells and charms for Disillusionment and Impenetrability, and then they turned around and went back in. It took him a few moments to realize he could just walk forward alone, away from the prison, for the first time in two years. There was a tamped desire path through the low brush and grasses down over a shepherd’s fence to the narrow and bleached-pale asphalt road. Beyond it the quicksilver spread of the loch — beyond it the hills smudged and blurry in the thick fog. The stretching spreading eternity of slate sky, April-dark, befuddled with fools’ pockets. The wedge of daytime moon was in one of them, and it was not raining but it smelled like it might. 

On the side of the road he put his garbage bag down and dug his walkman and his Slint tape out of it, and he put the tape on and tied the bag back up and walked onward. 

In Lairg he would take the bus to Inverness and in Inverness he could cash the galleons for pounds at the Gringotts branch, and perhaps he could contact someone, perhaps El or Lupin might do it, or he could try to make some quick money, and he would buy a train ticket to London. And in London who knew what he might do. Perhaps he would go to Imani and Flora’s flat in Camden Town but he doubted they lived there anymore. He could try to go to Fortis Green or to Whyland’s in Crouch End. Knock on the door and sleep on the stoop until they either called the police or let him in. 

The shape of the clouds mirror-mimicked the shape of the hills flowing into each other like a Van Gogh painting. The world was very beautiful. Sometimes the darkness was in the corner of his vision when he turned his head quickly. But then it was gone again. The smell in the old rain in the warm asphalt — bright warm shock of nostalgia — was almost transporting. The quantity of air, and the color. The sound of his boots with the torn sole flapping on the pavement and the wind over the music. “I can be settled down — and be doing just fine — until I hear that old train — rolling down the line — ”

In the middle of “Washer” he heard the car behind him and stepped onto the grassy shoulder. He wondered how much Muggles in this part of Scotland understood of the wizarding prison ensconced in several layers of magical concealment beyond the dells. If anyone who drove this road with regularity had become concerned or suspicious about the strange thin folks walking it toward the library and the bus station in Lairg. He thought about putting a thumb out but the car pulled over even before he could. It was a shitty old red Citroen and behind the wheel was Ras. 

“I’ve been driving up and down this bloody road for two hours,” he said. Exasperatedly he reached for the volume dial and turned down the car stereo, which was playing very loudly something Jack didn’t recognize. He looked unslept and sweaty, wild about the eyes, and his knuckles were very white on the steering wheel. “Where did they let you out?” 

“There’s a gate a ways back,” Jack said. His heart was beating in his ears. Washing tidal echo. “It’s all Disillusioned. You’ve _visited_ me here.” 

“They had a Portkey setup thing, you know, from the Ministry’s Department of Criminal Justice… will you get in the fucking car, love?” 

He almost couldn’t move. “Where are we going?” 

“Back home to London obviously. Unless you rather wouldn’t. I’ve done some questionably legal magic on the house I ought to tell you. But it means Liz Grey won’t be there nor Lovely Rita nor anybody else. Anyway it’s a long fucking drive and I need you to help me hold this car together with magic.” 

“What’s wrong with it?” 

“Every bloody thing…” 

“Can you pop the boot?” 

Ras tried but couldn’t so he had to get out and open it by breaking the spell he was using to keep it from springing open on the highway. Together they shoved all of Jack’s worldly possessions into it like puzzle pieces (gently with the guitar) and then they shut and locked the boot again and Ras embraced him. They stood there together for a long time unspeaking unmoving hardly breathing in each other’s arms. The wind pulled up out of the west across the long valley through the grand stillness stirring the grass and the strands of Ras’s hair against Jack’s face. Ras kissed his ear and his forehead and his cheek and Jack realized they were both weeping but silently.

Then they pulled apart, which almost hurt. Ras palmed the wet off his face and Jack lit two of the stale cigarettes. In the car he dug under the seats of the Citroen for the tapes Ras had brought with, and when he found it he put on Bowie’s _Station to Station_. 

“There’s a Van Der Meer Wizarding Atlas in the glove box,” said Ras, putting the car in gear. He had to step hard on the gas to get it to jump forward. “First order of business is we’ve got to stop for cigarettes somewhere because these taste like grave dirt.” 

Jack laughed. He felt so stupidly alive. Raw-new and full of a thunderstorm. “I didn’t think you would come and get me.” 

“Don’t be stupid, love,” Ras said. He reached across the stickshift and passed his thumb (callused and rough inside) over the tattoo on Jack’s forearm. They had caught together the way they had sometimes a decade ago, and nothing else was moving. “Don’t be bloody stupid,” Ras said again, softly. Perhaps to himself. His hand stilled and tightened around Jack’s wrist. 

They drove Southeast on the only road off the loch and eventually it began to rain. 

**Author's Note:**

> thank you to [montparnasse](http://archiveofourown.org/users/montparnasse/pseuds/montparnasse), [zambla](https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/zambla), [bilaqua](http://bilaqua.tumblr.com/)  
> join me [on tumblr](http://yeats-infection.tumblr.com/)  
> this story is dedicated to everyone who's ever been a little Too Obsessed with a band over some element of (perceived or expressed) queerness. thank you all so much for reading - it means a lot to me!


End file.
